Acting Styles: Evaluation

Today, we performed our scenes from A Midsummer Nights Dream. Our group decided that it was best for me to take over the role of Oberon as the Shakespearian dialogue was proving difficult for the original person we cast. This meant I had little time to get used to the character. We researched the context of the scene and I knew what my character was saying and how, which is annotated on my script below. I knew what tone to use and knew that I needed to show a flirtatious relationship with Titania, but at the same time a degree of tension and a bit of dislike, even though they are attracted to each other, without letting each other know.

I thought, considering the time constraints we had to prepare, which was one double lesson, we done well. The difficulty we had was trying to make the performance interesting and exciting, without any modern techniques. Shakespearian theatre had no movement or projections. It was very basic and we had to try and adopt this acting style as we'll as we could. We used our space and staged carefully so the set appeared more interesting.  Another feature was that we had to exaggerate our lines and body language to enge the audience more which I think we done with moderate success. But I think if we had more time we could have learnt out lines to an extent where we could have relaxed and acted without having to refer to our scripts constantly, then our acting would have been more over the top and thespian like. I found  this task very difficult as there was very little we could add and it was hard to understand.

Naturalism

Afterwards, we moved onto the style of naturalism. We were split into new groups and were given one lesson to create a naturalistic piece that focused solely on acting, with no visual aids. I came up with the idea of a funeral at which people bad mouthed the deceased only to realise that he wasn't dead and was standing outside. It worked very well as a dark comedy, but for the piece we were trying to create it did not. We decided to scrap the idea and devise one in twenty minutes, where people turned up to a funeral pretending to be the deceased best friends, as people are at their most popular when dead. I played the husband who became angry at the fact that everybody was claiming they knew his dead wife so well, even though he had just heard them bad mouthing her. Again, this task was difficult as there was little we could do, we just had to make sure our acting was very good, which we did.