Up close and personal

After kicking off last week with some full cast rehearsals, this week we stripped back and started to focus on the relationships between the individual characters.

Last night, Luke Onur and I wanted to really get to grips with the relationship between Nathan and his publisher. Since day one, Onur has had us doing exercises and games that really get us to listen to each other, and hear what other people are saying. The purpose of this is to make what we are doing believable, natural. It's not acting; we are actually there, in the moment, responding to what the other person is saying. Yesterday, Onur took this one step further and we kicked off the rehearsal by playing some warm-up games that really made Luke and I focus on each other, watch each other, take in all the detail. Once again, the purpose of this is to encourage us to do exactly this while we are on stage - watch what the other person is doing and what their body language is saying about them, their mood, how they are feeling. We need to do this in order to make our characters genuine. 

The focus of last night was for us to really start to understand and know our characters in depth. There is no right or wrong way of how to say a certain line, or react to something someone else has said. We just need to understand WHY we are saying it that way, or WHY we are reacting in that fashion. And to do this we need to get to know not only our character, but also the relationship he/she has with the other characters in the play. It's all about exploring. Making mistakes. Working out what doesn't work is just as important as working out what does work.

The script is the most useful tool to really understand our characters. It is the starting point beyond which we must explore. Last night, Luke and I did some improvising around the script, in order to understand what might make our characters say some of the things we do, helping us to start to grasp how we are feeling at certain points in the show. It really helped us to break the unnatural nature that so often comes with acting, and to really become our characters.

It was a really intense rehearsal, leaving us both a lot to think about before Saturday's rehearsal.

Until Saturday,

Jenny :)