The Rehearsal Process

Today we discussed Affective Memory, a popular system by Stanislavski.


Wikipedia says: "Affective memory was an early element of Stanislavski's 'system' and a central part of Method Acting, (two related approaches to acting). Affective memory requires actors to call on the memory of details from a similar situation (or more recently a situation with similar emotional import) to those of their characters. Stanislavski believed actors needed to take emotion and personality to the stage and call upon it when playing their character. He also explored the use of objectives, actioning, and empathizing with the character."

I had never heard of Method Acting before and to this was a completely different insight to acting I had never come across before, it was quite hard to think of significant events in my life and use them towards something completely different, I thought it was a kind of 'pretending' in a way, and using that emotion as a lie. Whereas when I portray emotion in all of my performances I like to empathise with my character and put myself in their shoes and imagine myself in that situation which normally works for me and I feel is a lot more efficient, although I still want to test myself and use emotional memory in my performance playing Alison.

So today with Jill, we sat in a circle and each told an emotional story we had experienced. We then had to use the emotion we had just developed and use it in a random scene or story. Andrew began, and told us all an emotional story he had experienced, Jill then asked Andrew to use the emotion and the fear of his story and use it to simply tell us the story of the Three Pigs.

We had obviously all heard the story of the three little pigs, but never like this. Once Andrew had finished telling the story of the three pigs, there wasn't a dry eye in the room. Andrew used the fear and the sadness of his story into a silly nursery rhyme, but Andrew didn't make it sound like any silly nursery rhyme, it was a believable, honest story, and we all believed it and it really got to us all. Jill then explained to us that on stage, actors actually use affective memory and then as soon as they are off stage they 'let it go' which is the effect.

Stanislavski also believed in:

Magic if - To help create any role, I've always found it helpful to attempt many improvisations. In the System this is known as the 'magic If'. The magic If opens up so many possibilities for the actor and can no doubt help them to explore new emotions with a variety of characters. But to aid the Magic If is the 'given circumstance'.This is the basis for the actor and the role. The given circumstances are: the story of the play, it's facts, (the characters in the play, who they are and their purpose); events (what happens in the play); time and place of action, conditions of life and finally the actor's and director's interpretation; the production, the sets, the costumes, the properties; lighting and sound effects. We use this exercise often and is one of our favourites, it's always one we do the day after a show and even though we play it so much, the joy of it is that every time you play it, it's never the same! We often create different scenarios and place them in envelopes and swap round and perform them.

Truth - The fact of the matter, truth is different for your character and their world than your own truth. The goal of any actor is to create the illusion of reality, or truth, while performing. The goal within this Stanislavski technique is to create the "truth" of your character and his world by "believing" the world of your character is real. Only through imaginative creation can this process be completed.

Relaxation - Stanislavski believed that in order to make a character true, the character must be approached from the inside. That means drawing on the real inside life of the actor, most specifically drawing on memories. The actor also has to create the inside life of the character: the character has to have inner thought, back story, beliefs, and so on, just as a real person does. When the actor answers questions about the character, they should speak in the first person.

"I am…" "I want…"

Jill does this often in rehearsals and also this is a laugh it does give us the chance to be our character and create that believable background. For example, last week me and Jess were sat at the table on the set we created and Jill came over and said she was going to join us for a cup of tea and act like we know her and she was asking questions like 'Oh I love that where's is from Helen?" and Jess would laugh and make a silly answer, but then when we realised what Jill was doing we reacted with serious answers. When we were going through our lines, Jill would interrupt and say "Oh really, why do you think you feel like that?" and I would reply by saying "Well I think it's because Jimmy said to me once..." and doing this really help us build up that believable background for our characters.

Concentration - As an actor, you should not rely on details to guide your performance. Rather, you must use these details to form the skeleton of your character. Concentration is the only way to guide yourself throughout the scenes. Personally, i've found that details such as character personality, relationship between other character and the world of the character are essential for a good performance. 
-notes from wikepedia

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Wednesday 5th June

Today we continued rehearsals and discussed our set. We decided we would have a single chair and a couch. Alison and Helena would sit on the couch together and we decided that the only person that would touch the single arm chair was Jimmy as we wanted to emphasise the fact that it was Jimmy's chair and only Jimmy's chair. When doing a read through rehearsal, we experimented with moving in different ways when saying certain things and we wanted to all of us to say and hear each line as if it was the first time we had said or heard it. We also watched videos on method acting with Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Method acting is also a method of Stanislavski's. This idea was first called the ‘System’ by Konstantin Stanislavsky, and later, as further developed by Lee Strasberg, ‘The Method’. The Method trains actors to use their imagination, senses and emotions to conceive of characters with unique and original behavior, creating performances grounded in the human truth of the moment. In the video with Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, his wife is shouting at him and he reacted naturally by slapping her in the face, when it was not in the script at all and the actress playing his characters wife wasn't aware he was going to slap her. In Look Back in Anger, there is so much anger and emotion in the scene we're performing and we want to use method acting to empathise with our characters and act and talk naturally like we think they would.


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Thursday 6th June

Today we carried on rehearsing whilst Jill was walking round and watching snippets of each perfoming. She watched our scene twice and gave us excellent feedback with minor improvements to make such as listening to what the other character is saying and reacting using stanislavskis naturalistic style of acting. We also used props for the first time and used old fashioned tea pots and tea cups to worked with as previously we were miming and it didn't feel as natural and realistic when we were rehearsing so it was really helpful to have both the set and the props.


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Characters and getting into groups

Today, we decided our characters and groups. Earlier on in the week, Jess and I decided that we wanted to work together as we think we both normally rely on eachother and we know we work well together and trust each other to learn lines quickly. When we read the script, we decided we would do the last scene of the play and asked Adam to join our group. We chose this scene because we have a 10 minute limit, and we felt this was a very significant part of the play where there is a lot of realisation and emotion that we wanted to express, and also the dialogue is spread equally between the three characters in the scene.

Look back in Anger was written in the early weeks of May of 1955. The play was first rejected but then creative producer for the then struggling Royal Court Theatre, George Divine decided to give the play a chance. The play received mixed reviews but got a great review from The Times. This established the play's notoriety and helped it eventually build an audience.

Characters:

Jimmy Porter:
Jimmy porter is the main character in the play and most of the themes of the play revolve around him. He is the 'angry young man' who expresses his frustration for the lack of feelings in his domestic life. He is thought a hero for his unfiltered expressions of emotion in a culture that propagated unemotional resignation. However, he is considered a villain for the ways in which anger proves to be destructive to those in his life, especially his wife Alison. His assaults on Alison are nasty and sometimes savage. I think he seems to be trying to force her to have a genuine response to him, which she rarely did,  He says she is not real because she has not suffered real pain and degradation. When she leaves he is hurt but quickly adjusts to his new changes. Jimmy has hated Helena for the same reasons he hated Alison, namely her social class and “proper” upbringing. While Jimmy apparently hates Alison’s mother,i think he seems to like Colonel Redfern because he can feel sorry for him.

Jimmy

• On the one hand, we get a more sympathetic picture of him from his background and childhood story about nursing his dying father.

• On the other, he is even more hateful in his attacks on Alison’s mother.

• He develops further his bitter feeling for Alison.

• He shows intense hatred for Helena, even discussing the possibility of using
physical violence on her.

• He uses his trumpet-playing as another kind of attack on the others, which his symbolic in the scene we have chosen to do as it shows he still inserts his authority and dominance even when he's not present in the room.

Cliff Lewis

Cliff is a friend to both Jimmy and Alison and lives with them in their attic apartment. He is a working class Welsh man and Jimmy makes sure to often point out that he is "common" and uneducated. Cliff believes this is the reason that Jimmy keeps him as a friend. He represents his class and he is as passive in thinking as Alison, which i think is why they both get on so well. But Cliff wants to upgrade himself by reading newspaper. He is practical-minded and tender in his feelings. He gives company to the lonely Alison.  He is quite fond of her and I think they have a strange physically affectionate relationship throughout the play.


Cliff

• We learn more about why he says: ‘I love these two people very much’.

• He has insight into the dangers of the situation: ‘And I pity all of us’.

• He doesn’t like Helena very much, solely because of her class, although that doesn't become an issue later in the play when they get together.

• His sympathetic nature immediately makes him volunteer to go with
  Jimmy to see Hugh’s mother.

Alison Porter

Alison Porter is Jimmy's wife. She comes from the solid upper-middle-class establishment. Her father was apparently a colonel in the colonial Service and the family lived very comfortably in India until 1947. According to www.wikidot.com her brother Nigel attended Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, and is a member of Parliament which I think would give her family a very good name back in them days. She then married into Jimmy's working class lifestyle. The audience learns in the first act that she is pregnant with Jimmy's child. Her child miscarries and she comes back to Jimmy to show him that she has undergone great suffering. Alison feels like she has no voice,she never has since she got with Jimmy and she remains quiet for a large duration of the play, and often only speaks either when she is talking to Cliff or Jimmy speaks to her. She is treated so harshly by Jimmy. At the end of the play, it's as if she wins Jimmy over; Helena leaves after telling Alison she think's Alison would be a fool if she went back to him, but when Alison pours her heart out to Jimmy, which is something she has never done having kept all her opinions to herself and only ever listening to Jimmy, Jimmy holds her and apologises and they cuddle and are affectionate which is something they never really previously had.

Playing Alison has been a challenge, most importantly using an accent. I think accents are part of imagination and characterisation and when I wrote notes about Alison, I knew specifically I wanted to have a strong accent. I felt more in character when I had used an accent. In many rehearsals I would try different ways of saying certain words, having such a strong accent myself, being so posh was quite a challenge, but having watched quite a few vidoes on Youtube, I started to find it easier and really got the hang of it, I didn't have a specifically strong accent, I used pronounced words correctly, using diction, and articulation. Jess and I used plenty of exercises to help us with out accents.

Alison

• She has benefited from Helena’s company for two weeks, and is feeling less
isolated.

• She talks about the embarrassing life she led in the early months of her
marriage.

• She tries to explain why she married Jimmy, again hinting at the
vulnerability she sees in him.

• The bear-and-squirrel game they used to play has ended. It had been their
retreat from the savage reality of their marriage.

• She says she wants peace.

• Yet she takes the dramatic step of going to church with Helena, knowing
that nothing will annoy Jimmy more

Helena Charles

Helena Charles is Alison's best friend. She lives with them in their apartment while visiting for work. Helena is from an upper class family. She is responsible for getting Alison to leave Jimmy. However, she seduces Jimmy and replaces Alison in the household, and this is something we wanted to emphasise in our performance, we wanted to make it evident that the roles had changed, as in our scene when Alison arrives; Helena is cleaning up the flat and making Alison tea when in fact it was Alison’s flat first. When Alison returns, Helena realises that her affair with Jimmy is wrong and has a hit of her morality and suddenly realises what she was doing with Jimmy was wrong and decides to leave. Although this doesn;t have an impact for Jimmy for long, as he quickly realises his love for Alison, which I think again this is one of the most important scenes of the play as there is so much realisation of emotions and morality expressed by such a different handful of characters.

Helena

• She is of the same class and background as Alison.

• She is supportive of Alison, to the point of fighting with Jimmy but this, of
course, encourages him to ever greater efforts of offensiveness.

• She is prepared to interfere to ‘save’ Alison. She sends word to Alison’s
father.

I am playing Alison, I think Alison is essentially quiet and reserved but when pushed to it shows a resilience and a strength. In her attitude to Jimmy she swings between a kind of anxious fear of setting him off on one of his tirades attacking her, and a love that is both tender and physical. She clearly cannot understand why he behaves as he does most of the time, and she does not know what it is about her that stirs  him to such fury. Her middle-class upbringing is always there - in her accent, her speech patterns, her vocabulary, her beliefs and her vulnerability.

Jess is playing Helena and Adam is playing Jimmy. We decided together to research the style of the late 1950s which was when the play was set. Not only 1950s fashion but also the styles of houses, what the inside of the bedsit they lived in looked like. 


I imagine Alison wearing this style of dress, but not this colour as such, not a striking colour, more a darker duller colour like a brown, or dark green. I will also wear a thin mac coat over the dress as in the scene we are performing, I have just arrived.

Obviously we won't be able to design a full bedsit, but we have planned to use the staging and accessorise them with vintage table cloths, old newspapers, etc. And we are dividing the stage into different parts of the bedsit e.g. living room, bedroom, doors etc, but this is how I imagine the bedsit to have looked. We will be using props such as kitchen accessories, tissues, teapots and teacups, newspapers, tablecloths, fake cigarettes, etc.


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Introduction to Look back in anger

From my research, I found that John Osborne was born in London in 1929 in a middle class family, and he grew up not enjoying school, which was a good job really as he was expelled at the age of 15 for hitting his teacher. Although he did begin working as soon as he left school and became an actor and immediately began touring for some years where he also began writing in the theatre and cinema. 

"Osborne has been considered by some critics as a left-wing dramatist even if he never seriously took a political activity. He was simply a rebel with a strong personality." - quote from http://rosariomariocapalbo.wordpress.com/ 

I do think Osborne has a strong personality but I think that is also passion, and I think that;s what went into writing Don't Look Back in Anger, I think Osborne had strong views and a strong perception of life and certain political activity and I do think he took it seriously and I think that's evident in certain scenes of the play.

According to www.nickelinthemachine.com Look Back In Anger was written in seventeen days while sitting in a deckchair on Morecambe pier . Look Back in Anger was a strongly autobiographical piece based on Osborne's unhappy marriage to actress Pamela Lane and their life in cramped accommodation in Derby. It also contains much of Osborne's earlier life, the wrenching speech of seeing a loved one die being, for example, a replay of the death of Thomas, Osborne's father. What it is best remembered for, though, are Jimmy's tirades. Many are directed against the female characters, and this is a very distinct echo of the playwright's profoundly uneasy relations with women, starting with his mother Nellie Beatrice. I found a very interesting quote online which says "All his characters are his own voice" which I think is a perfect way to know Osbornes view of the politics then as each character is an example of Osbornes views and they are all clashing at each other,and i think their long monologues and speeches are an expression of Osbornes frustration towards society then. For example, they all share senses of isolation because they are all different views alone.

Wikipedia says that there had been general improvements in living standards, employment and educational opportunities, which allowed working-class figures like Jimmy to have a university education and which generated the sort of audience which was ready to accept a play like Look Back in Anger. Yet many people were frustrated by what was felt to be a fundamental resistance to more thorough going reform and the limited nature of the social mobility which had begun to appear. Class and background still mattered a great deal. Personally, I think at the time the audience the audience would have been 

Today we were given the script to 'Look back in anger' and had a read to ourselves. Daniel then did an exercise with us, practised by Constatin Stanislavksi. Stanislavski would tell one of his students he was hiding a pin and tell them where it is, he would tell them to re enter the room and pretend to not know where the pin is, and then eventually find it. He would then hide the pin for real and tell the person to  genuinely look around for the pin. The purpose in this exercise was to show that if you know where something is you act around it and base what you're doing on it and that also when you're unaware of whatever you're looking for actually is, true and honest action comes out. 

We did this exercise today but with money as Daniel said he wanted to use something that was more useful to us. So Beth gave Daniel her £10 note and Daniel told Beth where he was hiding it and told her to re enter the room and pretend to look for it and then actually find it. So Beth re entered the room and looked all around her, going through the seats, emptying her bag and pockets looking for this £10 note, she looked behind the curtains then worked her way to the couch where the money was hidden. Daniel then told Beth to re enter the room having hid the note and not telling Beth where he had hidden her money this time. So Beth re entered the room and was genuinely looking for her money, and was only given 60 seconds to do so. Beth didn't do any of the actions she did previously such as checking her bag/pockets, she was looking under tables, chairs, and seriously panicking to find her money. Beth did get her money in the end but the purpose was to understand and notice the difference of reactions of actually acting out trying to find the money when Beth knew where it was an the second time around actually being unaware of where her money was.

We then talked about all the characters and our first thoughts on the play and started a read through. With this play, we have to get in groups and perform a 10 minute scene in 4 weeks time. By doing a read through, it gave a us all a taste of who we wanted to play or we could work with to benefit ourselves and each other. We also got to get to know the characters. After a read through we discussed the character Jimmy especially and his actions towards his wife and his malice self. Having a little read through today made me excited for the weeks to come and experimenting with different characters.