Rehearsals For The Play example essay topic

In this play I played the role of Lord Loam. An old man in his early 70's with little clue of how to survive in the real world. When we had rehearsals for the play I wanted a good part. When I found out I was too play an old man I tried very hard to put on the voice of an old man.

As this was set in the period of the early 20th century, I knew it had to be a posh sounding voice. This put a bit of stress on my voice, but I knew I would get used to it. The genre of the play was a fantasy comedy. There were a lot of fantastical elements to this play. For instance in act four when Lord Loam and Lady Mary were looking back at their experiences on the island. There was a lighting change to signify a change in mood.

During the play we did several improvisation exercices to get ourselves into character and really feel exactly how we should act. As an aristocrat, I had to learn to walk and sit more upright. They felt dominant to the servants and all the aristocrats had to show this by looking upon them like they has just crawled out of a sewer. Although my character Lord Loam, didnt feel this at all. He was all for equality and wanted the aristocrats and servants to get along.

But this is not how anyone else felt. The servants didnt feel comfortable being served and socialising with the aristocrats. And the aristocrats felt disgusted about serving the servants tea, and the thought of even talking to them disgusted them. This was obvious too see, as you could see the frowns on all their faces and the fake smiles. This is how my character developed throughout the play. The movement of my character had to be very energetic, yet slow and pondering.

I had to seem like I was slightly hunched in appearance to portray the age of Lord Loam, who was around seventy years old. I had to be energetic in Act 1 because I had to make it look like I was enthusiastic about the whole equality situation. My character is the only one who can bring true energy into the Act because everyone else is totally against my ways. I use my hands a lot.

I am very confident in Act 1 and I show this by waving my hands frantically a lot to make me look busy. My posture when in my formal costume has to be fairly upright, but with a slight hunch. But when I am on the island, I am much more hunched, not so tense, so this is more my normal posture, because I feel comfortable on the island. In the early rehearsals my voice was not as good as it should be. Maybe because I was embarrassed to experiment. I was not putting on a huskier voice like I should have been.

But in the final few weeks of rehearsals I put on my voice, as I knew I had to start talking in an old mans accent. Earlier on in the play my timing of coming on and off was always too slow, on account of I didnt know the play as much as I should have. I didnt learn the cues of other people so I knew when to come on. Throughout the earlier rehearsals, everyone's timing was slightly off cue, but we all worked on this and when we knew the text well, we pulled this off easily. When I knew the text, I found it so much easier to get into character. I find that I need the confidence first to really express the character properly.

When I have confidence it gives me the license to experiment with my own character and that is when most of my development of Load Loam took place. In the final rehearsals, we all had to work on our pace of everything we did, because the play was overrunning. But in our next rehearsal we did very much better and sped the play up a lot. The costume made me get into my character much more because I did feel slightly restricted. We all looked very different and this made me feel much more comfortable. My make-up helped a lot to make me act more like an old man, because it made me look very much older.

So it really encouraged me to look and act older. I want to play my character badly, so it really transformed my development as a character I felt. We had to make slight positional changes at the last minute due to lighting and sound. This was not much of a problem and was organised within one rehearsal.

My own performance I felt was very good, and in the last few weeks of the production I really felt involved in my character and knew how I should play him. Other character such as Ernest and Lady Mary helped me and gave me some tips along the way and they were very worthwhile. I felt that Lady Brockenhurst played her character superbly, as I knew how hard it was to play someone 50 years older. I think I could have done better in some parts of the play. When I went into my own fantastical world, I could have gone more over the top I felt. I felt all the servants did a very good job of getting into character and certainly made my part easier to play in Act 1 because you could see they were all very rigid and uncomfortable, and I could feel that and I could respond appropriately.