SWED FINAL FINAL

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 21^st 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 4^th 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.