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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