How effectively are you personally exploring and developing your role(s)?

9/10/12

My role is the cantankerous old Grandmother who constantly smokes and seems to have no control over how insulting she is to people. I originally developed the idea of the Grandmother as a more fragile, slightly kinder person who occasionally snaps and comes out with something shocking that nobody else would have the courage to say, but I thought that since the play is supposed to be more comedic and less realistic, I should make the character bigger and more exaggerated. I tried to find older people to observe so that I could adopt a realistic way of walking and posture for my character, but all of the older people that I saw out on the street seemed either to be really frail and have trouble moving, or they did not walk as though they were old at all, which gave me the idea that maybe my character should have difficulty walking but she pretends to be fine around people that she wants to impress or intimidate. This therefore helped me to develop her character more, as it shows that she tries to pretend that she is younger and more vital than she actually is, she is utterly deluded and thinks that she is desirable when she is actually quite grotesque. While researching my character I looked at the character of the ‘Nan’ in the Catherine Tate Show, who is similarly loudmouthed and disgusting. I did not want to copy the character in any way, but it helped me to understand that I have to be completely over the top with the character in order to make it entertaining. It also made me realise that I would like my character to be slightly more tacky than feeble; wearing too much make-up and leopard print. Of course she is still old and I am going to highlight that by the movement and voice, but I think that some of the comedy of the character is going to come from her desire to pretend as though she is not as old and infirm as she is. We came up with the idea that my character and Taylor’s character, my Granddaughter would occasionally argue comically with each other, mostly because our personalities are somewhat similar because we are related, but deep down they are both on the same side and will always stand up for each other if it is needed.

16/10/12

We have decided that the piece would be better if it was not just one continuous storyline, therefore we have decided to still carry on the theme of making it a comedy and having larger than life characters but we are considering making it a collection of a few short sketches, therefore I have been looking at sketch comedies such as Catherine Tate and Little Britain in order to get a better idea of the acting styles and how to introduce a short storyline and still capture the audiences attention. I discovered that the use of stereotypes means that the audience does not have to work hard to identify the character and get into the plot, therefore that could be an appropriate idea for me to use stereotypes in the piece.

6/11/12

My characters are the slightly shrill and conservative girlfriend of  an older man who is having an affair, and a lesbian who dresses up as a man in order to win back her ex. The style of the piece is over the top and exaggerated, and therefore I am performing the characters in an intentionally not naturalistic way, and although they are not really stereotypical characters, I am trying to perform them in an archetypal way. With the woman who dresses up as a man, I am acting like a stereotypical man who drinks beer and sits in an exaggeratedly manly way, with my legs apart, leaning back in the chair with obviously bad posture. Also, the way I walk when I show the difference between the character being a man and being a woman it exaggeratedly feminine to begin with, then exaggeratedly manly, as it almost sway slightly, walking very heavily on my feet and letting my arms just hang by my sides.
For the role of the slightly older, conservative woman I am playing a completely stereotypical woman with a posh voice and overexaggerated mannerisms, such as talking with my hands a lot in an overexaggerated way. The archetype should be easily recognisable to the audience, as should the other archetypes in the scene; the promiscuous secretary and the perverted old man. The characters are in the same style as the stereotypical characters in Carry On films and the humour is mostly innuendo and physical comedy and therefore the characters need to provide the comedy in their acting over the top and not naturalistically.
One idea that we discussed for one of the other scenes was the idea of a secret illness or infection, but when researching infections and allergic reactions, I only found infections to do with tattoos, cuts or side effects to drug trials, and none of these ideas seemed to fit with the tone of our piece.

12/11/12

We went to see 'One Man, Two Guv'nors' which is a farcical comedy. It contained broad, archetypal characters which are of a similar style, therefore it was helpful to visualise the type of comedy and characters that we are attempting to create. It was useful to experience a farcical performance from the audience's point of view, that way it helped us to realise what exactly it was about farcical comedy that makes it enjoyable. As well as giving us an example of the style of a farcical comedy, it also helped us generate new ideas for characters and archetypes that we did not think of originally, such as a posh character and a 'dumb blonde' character. This inspired us to brainstorm all of the archetypes that we could think of, which therefore gave us more ideas about different scenes that we could try.

16/11/12

We decided that it would be a good idea if individually we all came up with an idea for a scene, the characters and a secret as a way to generate ideas for the last two scenes that we need to devise. We thought that it would be a better idea if instead of trying to generate ideas in class, it would be better to think of ideas in our own time so that we come to the next rehearsal with plenty of unique ideas so that we do not get stuck, which has been happening increasingly in rehearsals.

25/11/12
As we focused more on the restaurant scene I thought that it would be a good idea to incorporate more physical comedy and so watched clips of  Carry On films, Laurel and Hardy and other more old fashioned comedy programs which included a lot of physical comedy and an over exaggerated acting style. The idea of looking at Carry On films came from the set text part of the course because we looked at Carry On characters when studying Lysistrata as the characters in both are extremely over the top and stereotypical, and innuendo appears frequently in both.

26/11/12
We tried to devise a scene with Hazel and Taylor as a posh girl and a more common girl who are friends, however, as Hazel was having trouble identifying with her character, we hotseated her and asked her questions that would be relevent to the scene, such as, what did she think of 'Stacey' and did she have many friends at school. Although this was helpful as it provided background information, the main problem was that the character was not exaggerated or archetypal enough, therefore we watched a clip of Made in Chelsea in order to help with the accent and mannerisms of the characters that we were trying to portray. This did not help as much as we thought it would, therefore we decided to take turns acting Hazel's role, each playing it in a slightly different way, with a different relationship with Taylor's character, which helped to give Hazel more ideas about the different way that she could play the character and different ways that she could make it more of an archetype.

27/11/12
The scene has evolved into a scene with two teenagers in a PE class and their teacher, and as most of our scenes involve three characters, I have researched the rule of three in comedy, and can refer to a few different elements; firstly it is a good rule of thumb that a joke that involves lists or repeating something, it should not have more than three things, secondly, it could refer to three characters that have a dynamic and play off each other to create the comedy, either because they are all different or there are two that work as a duo and the other character contrasts them. Comedians often use the rule of 3 in for example:
"my father and I would often go fishing. I remember swimming back to shore, thinking...
he also took me waterskiing once. I remember swimming back to shore, thinking...
But one Sunday he did let me play golf with him. I remember swimming back to shore, thinking..."
Therefore the comedy comes from the twist in the third part of the joke.

5/12/12
I researched comedy entrances on the BBC website and found that most comedy entrances work because of the element of surprise; for example characters enter in an outrageous costume and it is a visual comedy, although a clip of 'Only fools and horses' showed the characters ringing a comical doorbell and it was their straight faces that made it comical, therefore it gave us ideas about how to make the entrances bigger, and as both of my characters enter in the middle of the scene, it could be appropriate for me to enter in a big comedy way, however, I have not exactly settled on a particular entrance yet, but I plan to research more comedy entrances to help me develop my own. The over the top costumes in the 'comedy entrances' research helped us to realise how important it is to have over the top, funny costumes in the 'PE' scene.

11/1/13
'One Man, Two Guvnors' broke the fourth wall a lot, as the main character often spoke to the audience, and even pulled people up from the audience, which broke the reality of the play, and we used this idea in the 'restaurant' scene because the characters sometimes make asides to the audience, which not only makes it funnier, but also breaks the reality, making the piece more farcial.
My character in the last scene is an over excited posh woman who thought that it would be appropriate to go to a fancy dress party dressed as a baked bean. Her motivation in the scene is to find Trev, as she is somewhat obsessed with him, she possibly wants to go out with him, but as she is clumsy and ditzy, she keeps mistaking the wrong people for Trev. The posh element of the character is something like the posh mother character in The Catherine Tate Show who is so posh that she doesn't it when normal people try and talk to her, like the builders character; she doesnt understand that people actually do talk and act in that way. The builder character is exaggeratedly crude and almost disgusting, full of innuendos and will provide a more earthy tone to the scene which would be full of mostly posh characters if he wasnt there to offset that comedy with more rugged comedy.
I think that my strengths are focusing on the voice and facial expression for the characters, and the physicality of the character is something I have to work on quite a lot in order to make the physicality fit the scene, therefore, with some of the characters, for example when I'm playing a woman dressed as a man I had to watch men walking on the street to try and get the mannerisms into my performance so that I could exaggerate them, but realistically, so that the audience would immediately identify the character that I was trying to portray. I also think that the way that I devise characters is to just improvise and see what happens as I do not approach a character in a particularly analytical way, I usually just go with my instincts based on the idea for the direction of the scene and try to make the character fit appropriately. I find that lines and character that are thought up on the spur of the moment tend to be more quirky and real because the actor has not had time to choreograph the character and it just going with their initial instincts about how to play the character and how to react.