Curious Incident: Day 22/23

Curious Incident is now, sadly, finished. It was a great production to work on and I think it went really well on the night.

We started the week rehearsing as much as we could without our scripts and organising props and making sure we were creating the right scenes at the right time. On Tuesday, we tried a full run through of the play, which went very well, with only a few minor errors of forgotten lines and tiny mistimings of entrances and exits. On the Wednesday, we ran through the whole play, trying to work out our lighting, so we knew where to stand at what time. This was highly beneficial as we got an idea that we actually knew the play very well and could do it all without scripts, which also aided our confidence. There isn't much to say about rehearsals this week, only that we  kept on running the play as much as we could. We didn't change or work on anything else, we concentrated solely on running the play.

Evaluation of Performance

Overall, I think the final performance went amazingly well. We covered up errors effectively, so well that even I did not  notice that a scene was missing, thankfully it was only a small scene. One of the biggest mistakes was that we forgot to create the roundabout in Act 2, we all just wandered around until we realised and managed to slowly, one by one, create our roundabout, we did not panic and simply carried on accordingly. Which I think is a great skill, to be able to remain calm and carry on, convincing the audience that nothing went wrong. Individually, I forgot that we remained standing for a scene and I went to sit down. Fortunately, it was a scene where people were standing still, so I could conceal my mistake by freezing, then slowly making my way back into the scene. If I could change one thing it would certainly be the fact that we had little time to decide where our props went. We had to keep our props under our chairs and as we rehearsed with one more chair than we actually had on the night, we had to do a last minute shuffle around, resulting in me forgetting my sunglasses for a scene and us having to mime a train instead of using the one we had.

Aside from these minor details, I believe we performed very well considering we had to construct the whole play in 4 weeks and create so much with hardly any stage directions, so I think we done incredibly well.

In terms of developing my own skills as an actor, this was the first performance when I have actually messed up a little bit, but I was surprised at the fact that I didn't panic or lose concentration or break character, which I worried I would do. I have shown to myself that I can remain composed in that situation. I feel as if my experience in contributing to ideas will serve me well in the future should I have to create anything again.