Curious Incident: Day 15/16

Over the last two days we have been running the show from the beginning, without our scripts for as much as possible. We have also been making sure our annotations are all in place and help us know what we are doing and when. This has been beneficial as it shows what areas we need to work on and helps bring the play together.

Yesterday we focused on how our characters would walk, for some people this was easy as they only had one character. I went for my Duty Sergeant walk and decided as him being very upright, with his hands behind his back with a relaxed stroll of authority and confidence, without seeming too casual. We then looked at how other people walked as their character and tried to replicate them. This helped me understand how everybody's walk is different and that our walks determine our character and that they need to be different to show a variety of personalities just in our walk. We also worked on how we would sit in our seats from a neutral perspective, but making sure we were in character as soon as we stood up.

Today, we looked into subtext of our characters and were asked to pick one scene and annotate how our characters really felt, as this would effect our body language and tone, even though our lines may have said otherwise. For example, as Roger, I focused on how he would feel about Christopher arriving and staying, seemingly resulting in him being placed on the back burner with Judy's attention focused on Christopher and Ed. Judy seems to snap at Roger a lot and I feel he is constantly switching from being frustrated and Christopher and Judy to hating Ed and then defending Judy, so it was really quite confusing for me.

In terms of developing my own skills as an actor I think both activities will greatly help as it will allow me to think like my character, to get a deeper understanding of how they would behave and act, this will help to make my characters more believable and hopefully get me a better grade ! I could also use these techniques in future to make my characters as believable as possible.

I think today's lesson was extremely beneficial as we got through the whole play, in the hall, helping us get used to the space we have available. We have identified the areas we need to work on as the areas where we stopped or did not look good and know what we are good at allowing us to focus our efforts into one particular area.

For the future couple of lessons I think I really need to focus on how I am playing my character through body language, walking, thinking about subtext and tone. As does everyone, to get into the habit of playing our characters and getting used to them. Also, we need to work on the London train station scene, as currently it is very slow and quiet, with the lines all over the place. We need to speed this up to make it seem more believable and erradicate our current weakness, if we focus on that, the play will begin to look very strong.