Within our production of 130,000 I played the character of Ronnie, a troubled adolescent from South-East London who is a key witness to the stabbing of a character called Kwame. Throughout the rehearsal process I enjoyed developing the character of Ronnie immensely. Initially her character felt alien to me as Ronnie is not the type of character I have played before, therefore I had to think about her back story and how she feels living in a complex environment of poverty and gang culture. She has an upbeat and exciting personality along with some unpredictable behaviour, she is vulnerable and naive, she follows the crowd and looks up to her best friend Shanice, and tries to impress her constantly. Ronnie is the type of girl who failed at school and is a slight disappointment to her family, making her needy and emotional. Therefore I gave her some characteristic that I felt suited her and this description. I spoke with a fairly strong South-East London accent with a very slight Jamaican feel, as this is where I feel her family originated. I gave her a harsh vocal quality when speaking certain words, for example, when saying words like, here, though, I lowered the register to give more emphasis and to gain a comedic element to the speech, and I pronounced ‘th’ as ‘d’. Furthermore I made her speech slightly rhythmic and elongated certain phrases, I gave her physicality’s which mirrored this rhythmic quality. I had chewing gum when rehearsing and during the performance as this helped me to sustain the character throughout the production and gave attitude to her persona.

The character of Ronnie stemmed from watching Fallout on channel four, this gave me a good base to how to play Ronnie, it also gave me an insight to the relationship between Ronnie and Shanice. The character of Ronnie also developed through intensive rehearsals in which we responded to each others characters and utilised the notes provided from the director, dramaturge and other actors.

I also performed two verbatim extracts, one from Doreen Lawrence, Stephen Lawrence’s mum, and the other from Conan Taffee a whiteness who appeared at the scene when Stephen collapsed. This was to be delivered to the audience not necessarily acted, as we are not becoming a character we are speaking the real words from real people, this is not to say that there is no emotion on delivering the verbatim, it remains more about the words than the character. I found Doreen’s verbatim very emotional when speaking her own words, I felt her pain as a mother who was grieving, therefore the emotion was inevitably attached to the words. This piece of verbatim was at the end of the play and one of the most integral parts to the performance as it encompasses our company manifesto and defines the entire piece of merging fiction with verbatim. Therefore, I had an important job in making the text authentic, but at the same time, producing a compelling performance to express the seriousness and realities of the play. This was the reason behind ending the play with a piece of verbatim, as our script writer wanted to leave the audience with the realties behind 130,000.

With Fallout being inspired by the cases of Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence it brings about representations of real events, even more so with our insertions of verbatim,

‘Williams is intervening in a way that may allow new meanings and new understandings to emerge. The degree of success with which he can do this depends on how readily the parties involved can accept his representation as a sound basis for renewed consideration’ (Derbyshire 2007, p.418).

We as a company had to invest in the representations of the characters and the verbatim text and so do the audience. For the concept to work and for the performance to be innovating and inspiring, we all had to completely absorb our characters and understand the subtext. At first playing the character of Ronnie made me question, how am I going to play a young black Jamaican girl? After attending a workshop by Theatre maker Andy Smith entitled, ‘What does it take to make a theatre?’, he demonstrated through his methods that an audience can achieve believability in what is being presented in front of them. Just as an audience believe that Jud Law played Hamelt and they invested in him being Hamelt, the audience will invest in our characters because we are putting it in front of them. This is also supported through the story and the emotional connection the audience make with our characters, with Ronnie being funny and slightly stupid they liken to her and therefore it is believable, furthermore I believed my character one-hundred percent which conveys itself to the audience making it easier for them to invest their belief.  The audience build a connection to the fact that Ronnie has a huge predicament of whether to tell the police that her best friends boyfriend killed Kwame, furthermore the connection to Emile goes further, the audience feel sympathy when they see him living with the guilt but also feel bad for feeling this sympathy because he is guilty of murder, but this is why the characters works so well and is why the audience invested their belief and furthermore is why it becomes irrelevant that we are not black, the emotion, intensity and realness of the story supports the believability.

Derbyshire, Harry (2007) ‘’Roy Williams’’: Representing Multicultural Britain in Fallout’, Modern Drama. pp.414-434

Smith, A, (2013). What Does it Take to Make a Theatre? Theatre Company Guest Workshop, Lincoln, LSPA