Michaela Spinks-SWED A2
Theatre
Our
stimulus was Shakespeare, therefore we were to direct and perform our own
interpretation of our chosen Shakespearean play. Shakespeare was known as the
world’s dramatist, with his collaborations consisting of 38 plays, 154 sonnets,
and two long narrative poems.
Before
we decided on our ruling idea, as a group, we each took it upon ourselves to
research into Elizabethan times. I volunteered to look into the society of the
Elizabethan period, as I thought this would have a big influence on
Shakespeare's plays. From looking at the website "Shakespeare in American
Communities", I discovered that it was the British Peerage that determined
one's position within society. This therefore influenced the ranking of where
Shakepseare's characters would be placed on the stature of society. The Duke
and Marquess were seen as the highest ranks from being seen as a leader whereas
the Viscount and Baron were seen as the lowest rank from holding land directly
from the King or Queen. This information wasn't necessarily helpful to my group
and our production, however it did emphasise the structure of authority within
society, and how some people were not seen as so important. We did try to
incorporate this by showing that the witches were not people that you should be
proud off to know, or see because they were not popular in the rank of society.
People would be accused of being a witch which highlighted paranoia within that
period, which links back to the paranoia throughout Macbeth. I also found that
the women were very lowly thought of and was allowed no opinion and were to be
seen and not heard within society. This specific piece of information was
helpful to my group because we knew that Lady Macbeth was not just an ordinary
working class lady, she was a part of the royal family and would have been
treated with far more respect from outsiders. However we wanted to contradict
the expected quietness she would show, and show her as overpowering and
demanding. To the further my knowledge on Shakespeare and Macbeth, I went back
to basics on the website BBC Bitesize:William Shakespeare to gather more
background information. Macbeth is a popular story of Shakespeare's because it
covers themes of ambition and the evils we will go to in order to get what we
want. This influenced my group to express the strain on Macbeth to live up to
his expectations.
We
then as a group decided on the ruling idea of “Illusion”. This was bought up in
discussion when we each looked into a number of themes that were apparent
throughout Shakespeare’s plays. We also felt this is a recurring theme
throughout Macbeth that not many people are aware off. As we didn't feel we had
enough to go on just by thinking of the theme "Illusion", we looked
into a range of theatrical practitioners to see the different ways of representing
this theme, we looked in The point behind Epic Theatre was to get the audience
to think, and my group and I agreed this was something we wished to use. To
gather additional information on whether our ruling idea would work, as a
group we watched productions of Macbeth performed in an epic theatre
style, which were very abstract and quite haunting which appealed to us.
Although we wanted to modernise the play to appeal to a 21st century
audience, the style of speech would remain the same, however we
discussed changing some of the lines around, swapping characters specific
lines to see if they were given a different meaning depending on the
character who says it. Crime and punishment was very much a part of
life back in the Elizabethan times, and all of Shakespeare's plays involve
some form of violence and justice, we had ideas about incorporating these
aspects by making them the structure of the play e.g. a courtroom, however we
didn’t want this to take away the attention of our ruling idea.
I
feel as a group we all embraced a directorial role. When I felt my group were
spending too much time talking about our ideas, I encouraged them to get up and
physically perform these ideas to see if they were dramatically successful. I
feel this allowed enthusiasm to be passed around the group. The initial idea of
a court case was first brought up by Shantel, I then contributed the idea that
I could be representing whether or not Macbeth is found guilty of the killing of
King Duncan. We found this would be difficult to convey this idea to the
audience, particularly because we could only use Shakespearean text. As a
group, we kept a book full of ideas from each rehearsals session, which helped
us with progression. We then took part in exercises involving us either coming
up with a noise or movement that we thought would represent Illusion. This wasn’t
to necessarily incorporate into our final ideas, it was just to get an idea if
we could show this particular idea.
To
incorporate the influence from a variety of practitioners, we had a class
workshop that allowed our memories to be refreshed, or enlightened with someone
new we were unaware of. Throughout rehearsals, we discussed various possible
responses we wanted to gain from the audience. Firstly, we wanted to make them
feel on edge, as this linked back to our ruling idea. Georgia linked this to
the practitioner Artuad. She explained the unnerving nature of his work, would
allow the audience to feel uncomfortable, but intrigued. We wanted them to feel
like they're involved within in the performance, and to do this we spoke
directly to the audience, not only throughout our own individual monologues,
but also within all scenes particularly when playing the witches. We also
wanted them to feel intimidated and we did this by our choice of a conventional
stage layout for the audience, and we incorporated rostra’s to represent
different height levels, with us actors being higher up than the audience to
influence more intimidation. When we ran on stage as the witches, we ran
towards the audience which influenced them to move backwards. By controlling
and manipulating the audience’s movements, us actors gained control and
authority by taking away their free choice. Stanislavski's system
of using emotion memory influenced our performance because it was the method we
chose to produce realistic and relatable characters. Allowing ourselves to
become emotionally attached to the characters, particularly helped me become more
expressive and believable. This style of acting related back to Stanslavski. Imagining
ourselves in these real life situations helped our progression of our
characters by giving us an objective in each scene which gave them a solid
background. We each used one line from the play, spoken by our character, that
when we said it out loud, or in our heads, it reminded us of the feelings and
emotions we wanted to use to portray our characters. Artuad was
also a very big influence towards the techniques side of our production (lighting,
costume). He created a form of theatre called the "Theatre of cruelty”. We
started off the first scene with screaming and shouting from the witches to
allow the audience to think more about what was happening. This highlighted our
intention to have a powerful effect on the audience, allowing them to see a
piece of work that would stir up an array of emotions and concerns. We wanted
the audience to think about the performance, and think about how it’s
reflecting to them, and this were influenced by Brecht. His aim was to make the
audience to think, and to know they are watching a performance and not real
life.
As a group, we worked well together by using our own
contributions. Natasha contributed by being very good at note taking,
however she tends to struggle when playing a character out of her comfort zone.
To help Natasha, we got her to repeat certain lines from the script such as
"Double double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble"
with different voices and body movements. Her exaggerations enthused the rest
of us to also go out of our comfort zones, which relaxed the atmosphere
throughout rehearsals. Georgia was good at her time management of knowing
which scene to go into next. This helped the rest of us to follow in her lead.
Georgia was also very adamant to learn her lines straight away, this also
speeded up the process of us writing our own script, and allowed better
teamwork by us all helping each other to learn our lines. Natt seemed to
withdraw from expressing all of his ideas at the start, however gradually he
become more confident. The only problem with Natt was that he didn't learn
his lines till near the day of performance which affected the group
by decreasing the amount of real and thorough rehearsal time we had
without any stopping, therefore the majority of our rehearsals involved stopping
and starting and had no real flow. Shantel completely becomes the
character she is playing. She's good with both facial expressions and body
movements, however Shantel can get easily distracted which is difficult
especially when you have limited rehearsal time. She also sometimes wouldn't
turn up to rehearsals, or lessons which affected us massively because all of us
5 actors were on stage for the majority of the play, so having someone missing
was difficult because lines would be missing and certain movements and
transitions would be messy.
As a group, we kept a written document on the process of our rehearsals. This
contained notes of what we wanted to achieve within each rehearsal period we
had, and if there were any inconveniences, how we would go about them. Some
rehearsals, particularly those in the morning, the group as a whole lacked
enthusiasm and determination, however once we knew what we wanted to achieve
there was a better flow in our rehearsals. As my group and I struggled to
decide on where to start, once we did have a first scene to work with, we did
spend too much time going over this scene continuously to perfect it straight
away, however this decreased our progression towards the initial performance
because we spent more time on the first scene (which we ended up changing once
we completed more scenes and realised they didn't flow so well together), than
we did any of the others. We contributed a lot of transitions from scenes into
our rehearsals, as we wanted to be able to achieve full rehearsals without any
stopping.
To
settle on one particular play, each person in my group went away and
brainstormed on the different Shakespearean plays to list our preferences.
After much discussion, we finally settled on Macbeth as we thought this play in
particular incorporated a range of themes such as power, ambition,
relationships, trust and loyalty. It's quite a popular story, a lot of people
will know the original and therefore be surprised and intrigued when we show
our interpretation. We then went on to create still images of the themes within
Macbeth with a time limit of 1 minute. This was to help us express the story,
but also highlighting our ruling idea. After choosing our play, we each then
said which character we would prefer to play. I chose Lady Macbeth because I
think her character has a lot of depth. We decided as a group that we would
present our production as a dramaturgy style to really hone in on the dramatic
and powerful style of performance. We experimented communicating our characters
by trying a range of facial expressions and body movements that would highlight
her femininity as a women, but also their power as a male. This was to
highlight the gender divide within Elizabethan times. I experimented with the
facial expressions by interpreting each of the different themes that I thought
Lady Macbeth would represent e.g. showing femininity, I smiled slightly to look
accepting and approachable. To experiment with body movements I walked around
the room naturally at first, I then stopped and gained a powerful body
structure by imagining a piece of string pulling at the top of my head. This
pushed my upper body forward which emphasised confidence, but it also helped me
keep my overall balance and structure. I wanted Lady Macbeth’s emotions and
feelings to come across very clear, therefore I over exaggerated every movement.
I also tried subtle expressions as well, which juxtaposed with the abstract and
almost fantasy style of the overall play.
Back
in the times of Elizabethan England, women were very dependent on men, however
one discussion within my group was about whether or not Macbeth killed King
Duncan through his own actions or through the manipulation of his wife Lady
Macbeth. Natasha gave the idea of switching the typical idea of Macbeth
overruling Lady Macbeth, and instead have her showing the dominance. The scene
we chose to represent this was after the murder of King Duncan, when Lady
Macbeth is scolding Macbeth for not smearing the sleepy grooms with blood. We
incorporated Macbeths lines of "Whence is that knocking?" and "I
can hear a knocking" to show his vulnerability and Lady Macbeths anger at
his cowardice. I communicated the stress at his failure by shaking my head in
panic, frantically waving my hands to signify the urgency and importance of his
mistakes. I tried to show no remorse with my tone of voice, as I wanted it to
sound like she was scolding a child.
We
all played a part of the witches. Our first idea was for each of us to have a
different personality, or persona for our witch to have e.g. my witch was timid
and scared. Nat was the main witch, the leader who was strong and confident.
Natasha was the cocky witch, the smug sarcastic one who oozed confidence.
Georgia was going to play the smart witch, the closest to the main witch.
Finally, Shantel was going to play the crazy witch, loud but scary. To really
get into our characters, we would repeat a chant that they say at the beginning
of scene 1, "Double double, toil and trouble, fire burn and caldron
bubble", which we repeated over again, loud and then quite, high pitched
then low pitched, unclear then very clear, and we even tried speaking over one
another to express the dominance and fear. Repeating over one another worked
for us all because it made us come out of our comfort zones and it also
improved our team work in terms of creating a sense of rhythm and
co-ordination. We tried movements that looked like puppets, because this fitted
in with our ruling idea of illusion, and making them fantasy instead of real.
The idea of them being controlled like puppets was to insinuate that they were
there in the scene for a reason. We tried mirroring each other to create the
same movements at the same time to express unison within the witches, however was
a struggle as we couldn't work out the best movements to make the scene flow
and look natural. Overall these exercises allowed me to develop my character by
really getting a range of ways to express the witch I was playing.
A
few people in our group were more familiar with Macbeth than others, however we
used this to our advantage because the ones who were more familiar could bring
the knowledge, and the ones who were not so familiar, myself included, could
bring the new ideas and perceptions of the meaning behind the play. To develop
the ruling idea into the play, each of us looked into different themes within
the play, which were allocated by myself firstly volunteering to look into
loyalty and trust. We then gathered our information, and the next time we met
up we compared notes. The theme of trust and loyalty was quite popular. We
discussed how this links in with the whole illusion of the witches, and their
influence towards King Duncan’s murder by manipulating Macbeth’s mind. One difficulty my group and I had was settling on
one idea, which resulted in us losing a lot of practical experiments to see
what did and didn’t work. This slowed down our development because we didn't
find out if the ideas would work or not as we didn't try them out, we just
made our decision through discussion.
Our
stage was set in a site-specific style which was to influence a promenade
structure that would allow the audience to walk around or stand on the stage
with the actors. This emphasized a more intimate and private atmosphere.
However, keeping safety regulations in mind, we mainly kept to a thrust stage
as though not to block the fire exists. Not giving the audience chairs resulted
in putting the audience in a slightly uncomfortable position. We were told to
use 4 rostres at the start, however further down the rehearsal stages we were
told the 4th rostre would be for the person recording. We worked
with this by deciding to work more with the audience by incorporating a member
of the audience within our first scene with the witches, and having the
audience standing allowed them to become more accessible. Once we had brought
this person into our performance and returned them back, although the audience
looked uneasy and backed off slightly in case they were also going to be
picked, it highlighted an intense atmosphere that made everyone feel on edge. We
kept the staging very simplistic to relate back to Brecht’s bare staging, and
any props we used were already on show. The lighting we used was mainly white
spotlights on the actors that were on the middle of the floor in front of the
audience, however the rostres were always lit as we had actors who were not
part of the scene, creating still images on the rostre’s. For the “Crowning
scene”, we incorporate a purple wash to highlight royalty. All the scenes involving
the audience we used green and blue spotlights to influence mystical and
evilness from the witches.
When
it came to organising the costumes and props, we knew that we wanted to keep it
all very minimalistic, so for costumes we kept all outfits for all characters
just black. We thought that costumes would distract the audience’s attention
towards our ideas of representing illusion, as if they were too realistic they
wouldn't fit in with our theme of an un-natural setting. We added props such as
a crown for the scene in which Macbeth was crowned King to emphasize what was
happening. We used sticks in the first scene with the witches to exaggerate the
sound and create a more intense atmosphere. We also wanted the
clothes to be comfortable for us actors, otherwise the actions may not have
looked so natural.
We
incorporated thunder and lightning within the first scene to create dramatic
tension and add a sense of panic and concern within the audience. We then
slowly had this drowning out when the first witch started to speak. For the
scene when Macbeth was being crowned, we added the sound of trumpets to
influence a sense of royalty and humour that juxtaposed with the circumstances
as to how Macbeth became King. We incorporated physical theatre by pulling on
Georgia who was playing Macbeth, to emphasize Macbeth’s confusion from his
actions. When we were pulling Georgia, we were representing all the influences
he had towards his actions e.g. Lady Macbeth, Banquo and King Duncan.
After
performing on the night, I had people complimenting my versatility within the
characters I played. I felt triumphant about this because I wanted the two
characters to be easily distinguished, especially because I had no change in
outfit to highlight each character. We planned for the story of Macbeth to be
less apparent throughout our performance, and be more about picking out scenes
we thought were relevant. There was a technical issue with the lighting and
sound during our performance. During one of the monologues within our play,
there was a blackout for at least half a minute. Luckily, the actor carried on
throughout, however it put all of us on edge because we didn’t know if the
lights had blown, or whether the lighting technician had got something wrong. The
sound of trumpets in the crowning scene was the cue to our actions, however
instead of trumpets the thunder and lightning played instead. The two actors at
the front who were to lead the actions that followed, however they waited for
the thunder to stop, then went on with the actions and we followed their lead.
I would have liked for the audience to have moved around more, and been brave
enough to come onto the stage, however a lot of people are not massively
educated on this type of performance.
