Category: Oliver Parkes

So the show has now been and gone! Last night was the first production that Forefront Theatre Company has created, and hopefully the first of many!

 

The performance ran almost completely smoothly, with the audience really seeming to enjoy the show. All of the comments I received afterwards were positive, which was nice, and many of them commenting on the comedy of the production. This was brilliant to hear, as even though they didn’t know it, I was responsible for writing most of the original comedy that went into the production. I was very pleased with how the expectation vs. reality scenes and the Tinder scene went, as I was worried they would fall flat. It is hard for anyone to judge their own work when you’ve watched it so many times that it isn’t funny anymore!

 

As for the actual production, I feel although it went very well, nerves did affect me more than I hoped. Most of us came into the first song a little too early, myself included. I also came in with the wrong melody for the second song, also due to nerves, but I corrected myself quickly and all in all, the show went very well.

 

We had our problems as a group, but we managed to pull together to create an enjoyable and hopefully poignant show, with light and shade throughout, and I am looking forward to whatever our next project may be.

 

Ollie

Today I was given a new character who I would be portraying in the show. This character, similar to the previous one, is a father, and we will also be showing his story as a part of the “Have A Family” section. This character, as I gathered from the text I was provided with, is coming into a family consisting of a mother and her three children, and is understandably nervous about it. He talks almost entirely about the relationship he had and worked hard to form with each of the children, so we know that he is a particularly paternal man. He is loving, hard working and dedicated, as shown by his spending six months trying to get his new girlfriends children to like him and never giving up on them.

 

As for how to portray him, we (the director and I) agreed that we needed to make him as different from the man in the Bosnia story as possible, as I was playing both. The diction and grammar are different as his first language is English, in comparison to the Bosnia story’s verbatim, in which his native language was not English. The director commented that the language almost seemed quite nervous throughout, and so this was something I added to my performance.

 

I mostly used Stanislavsky’s methods in creating my characters. There were four main parts to his methods. The first is emotional memory: because I, as an actor, must use my own emotional memory to portray the character’s feelings at any given moment. This particular character as I have said, seemed nervous so I used my own experiences of being nervous to influence my portrayal of this character. The second thing you need to consider with Stanislavsky’s method is the given circumstances. These are: ‘the plot, the facts, the incidents, the period, the time and place of the action, the way of life, how we as actors and directors understand the play, the contributions we ourselves make, the mise-en-scène, the sets and costumes, the props, the stage dressing, the sound effects etc., etc., everything that is a given for the actors as they rehearse’ (Stanislavsky, 2008, 52-53). The given circumstances for this character would be being interviewed, as this is why he said those things, but who is he being interviewed by? We decided that I should act as though the audience have asked me about my time coming into this family and use that as the given circumstances. The third thing is the “Magic If”. Stanislavsky says that ‘stage action must be inwardly well founded, in proper, logical sequence, and possible in the real world’ (Stanislavsky, 2008, 48) and it was the “Magic If” that helped create this.

 

These allow the actor to create truth in their acting, and it is this that Stanislavsky wanted in his actor’s performances. I used these methods on my own portrayal of the verbatim in order to act it the best way possible.

 

Ollie

 

Step-Parent-Verbatim-edited

 

Stanislavski, K. & Benedetti, J.,(2008). An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, New York: Taylor & Francis, Inc

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

 

Bosnia-Verbatim-barely-edited

 

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.

Upon some deliberation with how the script and the performance is going, we have decided that it would be better for me to be first marked on performing, and second marked on writing, due to the ratio of boys to girls in the group and how the script is panning out. I will still have an effect on the script, but to a lesser extent than before.

 

Our director approached me about the lack of comedy in what we have so far in our script, and with an idea of how to change that. The idea was that we have an “expectation” of what will happen, things like Santa at first being a magical present giver, and then finding out that actually he’s made up. As our piece is now focusing more on different “sections” of life – Growing Up, University/Job, Finding the One, Have A Family, and Retire – we decided that it would be best to have them particular to each section. For example, in the “Have a Family” section, there was:

 

‘Expectation: When I’m a parent, I’ll still have time to have a social life!

Reality: I have more contact with the Teletubbies than I do real human beings.’

 

We decided that there would be five of these per section, as a sort of through-line going throughout the entirety of the piece to contrast the much more serious verbatim stories that we had collected. I have attached them to this post.

 

Expectation-VS-Reality-FINAL

EDIT: Later was added the final expectation/reality starting ‘I’m going to live to be 100!’ but I have added it here for convenience.

 

Ollie

One of the first things we had looked at, back when we were thinking of looking at different topics instead of growing up, was a scene written by Hope about the internet dating service Tinder. She had used it originally to demonstrate, using comedy, stereotypes of men and women dating, and turning the ideas on their heads. Basically, instead of the stereotypical man trying to get sex from a woman looking for love, the man was the lovesick one and the woman was the one wanting just a sexual fling. We decided that this could still be used once we decided on our final idea of growing up, as dating is a huge part of many people’s lives. Hannah and I edited the scene so that it made more sense – we changed the set up of it so that both genders were on both sides, and Hannah made the dialogue flow between the two pairs.

Tamsyn then approached me and asked for more comedy in the scene. I came up with the idea that, as the scene already mentioned a few staple “emojis”, using more could really bring comedic value to the scene. So I set about adding these to the scene, usually midsentence, as the juxtaposition of real dialogue and modern emojis spoken out loud unexpectedly creates humour, especially as things like “peeling banana emoji” would be said dead-pan. I am looking forward to seeing how this scene works with our actors!

Ollie

Tinder scenes ORIGINAL

Tinder Scene FINAL

Tinder scene EDITED

Final tinder scene in performance