Preparing to play a character in any form of acting requires a huge amount of research. An actor or actress must ‘know’ their character in detail, from their background and upbringing right up to their current emotional state and thoughts when performing scenes on stage. My main character in our production was called Ashleigh, whose story the audience ‘drop in’ on throughout the performance when Ashleigh is at different age stages.
In order to prepare to be Ashleigh there were several different techniques I used. The first was to read through all scenes in which Ashleigh appears (even though I would not be playing Ashleigh in all of them) to be able to understand where the character began and where the character was going, in terms of life experiences and emotional experiences. Secondly I built a ‘Character Profile’ for Ashleigh, which involved creating a table of the character ‘facts’, ‘history’ and ‘personality hints’ that I found in the script. Paul Elsam describes the importance of these elements in his book Acting Characters as they become a tool to create ‘a real, believable, three-dimensional character’ (2006, p14). This ‘Character Profile’ is similar to Stanislavski preparation method, in which he asked his actors to assess their character from a psychological perspective, taking in to account the character’s given circumstances, their objectives (what the character wants to achieve in each scene) and their super objectives (what the character’s overall objective is in the play).
(Photo by Clare Owen 2015)
Ashleigh’s experiences throughout the play were different to my life experiences, as described by Shomit Mitter, this can be tricky as it is hard for the actor’s mind to ‘create and then construe as real what it does not already know in some measure.’ (1992, p16) However by recreating unfamiliar experiences in rehearsal, I was able to create ‘novel dimensions of engagement and experience’ (Mitter 1992, p16). An example of this is in Scene 3 when Ashleigh overhears her parents arguing through the door. The scene was rehearsed in blackout so that I could only hear their words just as Ashleigh would. This helped me to react naturally when saying the lines which documented this scene.
WORKS CITED
Elsam, P. (2006) Acting Characters. London: Methuen
Mitter, S. (1992) Systems of rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski, and Brook. London and New York: Routledge
Owen, C. (2015) Photo of Character Profile