Week 24: Classwork

On Monday, we didn't have a lesson because it was a bank holiday but our Berkoff group decided to have an extra rehearsal because we needed to change a lot of the staging and also the representation of Les and Mike. We went through the script and looked at the lines that were being said to help us define who Les and Mike at certain points. For example, the first line I say is "And round the back we went that night, the fog was falling fast, our coat collars were up and our breath like dragon's steam belch forth from our violent mouths," and I am Les at this point because I have introduced the fight that they are about to have and then the other two members of my group would then become Les and Mike and I would become the chorus member. If we had a cast of 5, there could be more of an atmosphere as they could be reacting to all the lines that were being said and then it would highlight the comedic qualities. If we did this as a duologue it would be much clearer who was playing Les and Mike which is why we had two main characters and then the third person was the chorus.

With me playing the chorus this meant that I had to change the wording of some of my lines. For example, one of my lines was "But we could hardly turn back now..."  and this would have been alright if I was playing one of the named characters, so I had to change it to "But they could hardly turn back now."

Wednesday

With all of the little changes that we made, we performed it to the class:

https://youtu.be/uLzS-IjmOP4


After watching all of the performances, we all got given a script called Lunch. I did a little research on the play and found out that it is mainly performed by 2 people; we're performing it with 4. I feel that we actually have an easier way of doing it because if there were only 2 people on stage, you would have to exaggerate your body language even more than your doing so that the audience would understand that you have become the conscious or if you have return to reality.

Our first reading made it clear that Lunch was completely different from East and we now had the consciousness of the man and woman speaking. Initially, the first thing that I found hard was deciphering between which lines were being said by the actual man and which ones were his conscious, as I was going to play his conscious. The lines that we thought were the consious speaking are highlighted in pink.

We decided that we should block some of the movements first and add in what we know about the Berkoff style and then proceed to learn the lines and speed up the gaps in between each line. The first thing that we had to decide was how we should show that the man's conscious and his body were going to look as one at the start. We decided that Sarah, who was to play the man would walk in front of me and I would have my arm around her waist and then we would walk with the same foot first and at the same time until I noticed the woman sat on the bench.

As we progressed with the script, we found that the consious' wanted their conversation to turn sexual which was completely the opposite of what was actually happening in real life. We wanted to show the juxtaposition between the thoughts and the reality so when the man says "Lovely day!" both the man's consious and the woman's consious react with groans and disappointing noises as they both thought that he was going to ask her something more personal or even sexual but instead he asked her about the weather.