Our response to the tale was very literal as we created the scene in a park environment, in which we each were a different part of the characters attributes that were mentioned, one jogged around, another was obsessed with shoes, another hung up on some guy and so on. I wish we had done something more interesting than just going for the obvious as that seems awfully childish, but we were not given great amounts of time and we spent most of it talking about the character and the tale, that when it came down to preparing a piece, we did not have enough time to come ip with something of good quality.
I wanted to develop my use of my body, to make the scene a bit more physical but we did not have enough time to practice it enough so it would go well. My homework did help me tap into the character though. I was being the love sick side of her, being jealous of any other girl he would talk to, even if it was my friend. But I think that there was too much going on in the scene at once, and although I'm not sure how it looked for the audience, I thought it was a bit messy. I would like to have more confidence in some of my ideas because I usually just push them down if I don't think they're good and I don't really speak out if someone else is talking. I would just like to relax a bit more on and off stage.
We got put into different groups then, to read tale 6 again and circle all the characters. They were:
- Narrator
- Landlord
- Brother
- 'Warm, tired woman'
- Her daughter
- 'Hard, sly man'
- His daughter
- His mother
- Others at the pub
Because he is one of the main characters, I was rather restricted as to how I could mould him as a character. As he may seem horrible and scary on the outside, he is really just a boy inside. He made a few bad choices when he was young that he has never really been able to shake, and he has regretted them ever since, especially because it is keeping him away from his daughter and kept him from saying goodbye to his mother. He tries to keep himself to himself but it never really works out. Something always happens where people expect him to lash out and fight, do anything really. But not this time, this time he has shown his true colours but ignoring his demons inside that are telling him he'll never be good enough and that he can't change so what's the point? No, this time he allowed the storm to evaporate and just let his natural self take over.
In my group, we divided ourselves into even smaller sections, to be in pairs. One was the mother in America on the phone to her mother, the another was the conversation that the woman and man are having that we do not get to hear in the play and the final one was of the man having his final moments with his mother. I was in the second one and although we knew it had to be short, we kept in mind that we did have to follow a structure of them each telling their story to the other. I liked having to invent that conversation because I find it's quite beautiful how something terrible almost happened, then something magical happened, and the crisis was averted. We did not do anything fancy physically, we just sat and talked, because that is what they were doing, and the simplicity of the scene is what I think is the best part because it's not a full on battle between the two. It is two people who both have a hole inside themselves and just having someone to listen to them has made their day a million times better.
I enjoyed Ella's interpretation of the daughter in America, that came back engaged to someone who she has only known a brief period of time. It simply emphasised her lack of appreciation to the woman who raised her as best she could, giving her all her love and affection and getting nothing in return. And when she just leaves for a party, not even caring that she may have given her mother the biggest shock of her life, it made it ten times more effective.
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