After choosing our chosen Play (Macbeth), we each then said which character we would prefer to play, and I chose Lady Macbeth. After our initial exploration as a group we decided on the ruling idea "Illusion", as we feel this is a recurring theme throughout Macbeth that not many people are aware of. We decided as a group that we would present our production as a dramaturgy style, however, I made a point that I would like my style of acting for my character to be more Stanslavaski, as it is how I would be able to represent my character to my full potential.
I experimented communicating my character by trying a range of facial expressions and body movements that would highlight her femininity, but also my power. I experimented with the facial expressions by interpreting each of the different themes that I wanted her to represent e.g. to show power, I kept my head up high, squinted my eyes slightly to make them look more focused, my eyebrows naturally narrowed, however I created a slight smirk with my mouth to emphasise a sense of confidence from Lady Macbeth. 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, my head raised, my arms were crossed across my chest. This pushed my upper body forward which emphasised confidence, but it also helped me keep my overall balance and structure. I wanted Lady Macbeths emotions and feelings to come across very clear, therefore I tried over exaggerating my facial expressions and body movements to the point they were over the top and out of the ordinary, however I also tried the actions and facial expressions in a more subtle way to come across as cunning, but also quite sly, so that it could be obvious to the audience what she was up to, but not so obvious to the rest of the characters. The subtlety of my character juxtaposed with the abstract and almost fantasy style of the overall play, which would highlight Lady Macbeth’s stubbornness and individuality.
My role began to emerge when I was put with the other characters, as I began to think as to how Lady Macbeth would respond to general conversation. 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. To express this, we wanted to switch the typical idea of Macbeth overruling Lady Macbeth, and have him running around following her instructions. 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, and we had many different ideas as to how we wished to portray them. 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 the newcomer, timid and scared and very nervous. Nat’s witch 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, the intelligent one. 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 incorporated shouting within the first scene to introduce them, because we wanted them to be feared and come across as haunting and possessed. We then 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 robotic movements to again make them look controlled, however this was more of a modernised and abstract interpretation as opposed to the puppets. We tried mirroring each other to create the same movements at the same time to express unison within the witches, however this proved a slight struggle as we couldn't quite work out the best movements to make the scene flow well and look natural. Overall these exercises allowed me to develop my character by really getting a range of ways to express the certain witch I was playing, and allowed me to see what worked best and what didn't.
Our stimulus for the devising process 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. To choose a play to produce a production on, together my group and I researched various Shakespearean plays such as Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummers Night’s Dream, Othello, and also looked into combining them all together (we thought this would be a natural way of incorporating humour into the piece). Each person in my group went away and brainstormed on the different plays to see which ones we each preferred, and which we thought we could easily adapt into our own version. After much discussion when we got back together, 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, which would give us a broad range to experiment with, and because 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.
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 fresh new ideas and perceptions of the meaning behind the play. To come up with the overall ruling idea of the play, we each looked into different themes within the play, which were allocated by myself firstly volunteering to look into loyalty and trust, and then the others following and choosing their own theme. We then gathered our information, and the next time we met up we compared notes. Unexpectedly, we all had a few of the same ideas and notes on inequality throughout the play and the pressure and expectations on Macbeth, and also discovered that one way or another all the themes linked in with each other. The theme of trust and loyalty was quite popular, however someone else in the group had looked into illusion. We discussed how this links in with the whole illusion of the witches, and their influence towards King Duncan’s murder, and also the illusion of Lady Macbeth being this loving wife with only the best intentions of her husband, however really being the opposite in some people’s opinions. 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 into Artuad’s idea of epic theatre which was a theatrical movement arising in the 20th century. 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, particularly if using the theme "Illusion" because it isn't the most obvious theme to express. 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 actually find out if the ideas would work or not as we didn't try them out, we just made our decision through discussion.
To gather additional information on whether our rulling idea of "Illusion" would work, as a group we watched productions of Macbeth performed in an epic theatre style, which were very abstract and quite haunting which is a style we would like to go for. To keep a sense of Shakespeare within our play, we did want it to be quite comical, but this was just to help express the deeper meanings within the play that the viewers may not have seen or thought about before. Although we wanted to modernise the play in terms of the acting and set design, the speech would be kept the same, however we discussed changing some of the lines around, maybe 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.
There were 5 of us in the group, and each had their own strengths and weaknesses that we used to our advantage. For example, 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 come out of her comfort zone and experiment with different voices and movements, we got her to repeat certain lines from the script such as "Double double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble". Even though she found it challenging to slow her speech down and to put some facial expressions and body movements along with it, we managed to get her to practise it in a more natural way then becoming more abstract for her to familiarise herself with her movements.
Georgia contributed by trying anything in terms of different styles of acting, whether it's in her comfort zone or not. She was also good at her time management in terms of knowing which scene to go into next, and where and when she needed to be ready. This helped the rest of us to follow in her lead. Georgia was also very adamant to learn her lines straight away as she said she has difficulty to learn them quickly, 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.
At the start of the exploration, Natt seemed to withdraw from expressing all of his ideas, 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 is a very talented actress, because she 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.
I feel I contributed to the group by bringing the enthusiasm in rehearsals, and by getting all the last minute aspects such as the lighting and props together in the last few stages of rehearsal. 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, and when we had a bad rehearsal, or something didn't necessarily go to plan, I managed to find a positive and a goal to work towards.
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. We chose our piece to be conventional and chose not give the audience chairs which resulted in putting the audience in a slightly uncomfortable position. We wanted to incorporate 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.
As a group, we planned for various possible responses from the audience. Firstly, we wanted to make them feel on edge by starting off with loud banging and screaming. We wanted them to be intrigued and feel like they're involved within in the performance, and to do this we spoke directly to them 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.
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.
Initially we were not 100% certain on what our ruling idea was going to be, however 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 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 within society, and how 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 of 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.
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. As none of us in the group had experienced real life versions of the events in Macbeth, it was difficult for any of us to have anything to relate to, however we asked ourselves "How would we feel if we were in this situation?” This helped our progression of our characters by giving us an objective in each scene which created 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. He created a form of theatre called the "Theatre of cruelty", which he thought would help bring out thoughts within the audience that they may have not been aware of before. He believed in the actors not having an emotional connection with the characters they were playing, he was more into informing the audience about whichever aspect the play was covering. 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.
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 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.
