Although I didn’t come into this company wanting to perform, I understand that in companies such as these we must make compromises for the good of everyone. As one of only two boys in the group, it makes sense that both of us play the male roles, especially as so much of the piece is verbatim, even if it means I need to put my wanting to write on the backburner for the time being.
I was given the part of the Bosnian character today, a part I share with fellow performer Sophia, who also acts as our producer. I don’t know anything about the actual person whose verbatim this is, and so the director and I worked on creating the character for this scene. We know from details in the speech that the character is a father and that he went to war. Sophia told us, and the accent that he has also tells us, that he is Bosnian. We know that he has moved around a lot, and the general timbre and sound of his voice gives us an approximate age for the character. The recording also gave us a little bit of information about his family – he has a daughter, and used to be married. He was quite young when he got his girlfriend pregnant, which suggests that maybe it wasn’t on purpose, and why they went from “girlfriend” to “wife” so quickly.
At first it was daunting playing a character so far from myself, but as Alecky Blythe states: ‘The technique is so transforming – you’re copying their words so precisely – you can play quite far from yourself. It was very exciting, when I started out as an actor, to be able to play a Jamaican grandma, because I’d never normally get cast for that part.’ (2013). Like Blythe, the prospect was also exciting – there’s no way in any other circumstance I’d get to play a character like this. I read books like Verbatim Verbatim by Will Hammond and Dan Steward to get an idea of what performing verbatim was like. However, because I was learning from a script and not the original recording, my performance ‘lacked the accents, emphasis, colour, pitch, pace, intonation and inflexions of the original speaker’ (Taylor, 2013, 370). I tried as much as I could to stay true to the original words of the character regardless, just with the addition of my own character.
As two people were playing the character, our director decided that we would have to make the characterisation of this part very particular in order to show that both performers were playing the same character. To this end, we decided that things like touching the face and the same rhythm in speech were paramount. Putting on an accent as the character’s native language was not English, we felt would have been a step too far, and could have come off as offensive, so we felt it was best to speak as we normally do, only slower to give the impression that the speaker was not entirely comfortable with English. We were already using clothes, in particular shoes, to show that someone is playing a particular character, so we decided to use a military-esque jacket to show the transition between me playing the character and a different actor playing him.
Ollie
Blythe, A. (2013) Alecky Blythe: How to create verbatim theatre. [online] Ideas Tap. Available from: http://www.ideastap.com/ideasmag/the-knowledge/alecky-blythe-london-road-on-verbatim-theatre [Accessed 20th April 2015]
Taylor, Lib (2013) Voice, Body and the Transmission of the Real in Documentary Theatre. Contemporary Theatre Review, 23, (3) 368-379.