Evaluation of Final Performance

Today we did our final performance and I thought it went really well. I was proud of my entire class and felt that all the performances were well rehearsed, all lines were learnt and no significant mistakes were made. 

I watched a few videos on Look back in Anger, all of which were very different from each other, but none of them really struck out of me and I never watched any of them and thought 'Oh, i need to say my line like that' or 'I'm going to lie down against the couch like that' I thought to myself I would rather read the script and do what feels natural, and that's exactly what my group did from the very beginning. No rehearsal we have done has been exactly the same, in every rehearsal we've experimented and moved when it felt natural to. Many structures of the performance changed gradually throughout the rehearsal process, and we incorporated many new ideas, all of which stayed in the final performance. We used emotional memory, all of us in our own scenes. For example, Jess used emotional memory in the scene where Helena decided she was going to leave and when she is explaining to Alison when she saw her at the door 'ill, tired and hurt'. I used emotional memory when I saw Helena and Jimmy holding each other when Helena told Jimmy she was leaving but told him she will always love him, as I thought that was something that would make Alison's stomach turn, and make her feel sick, and sad. I also used emotional memory specifically to encourage the natural emotion of Alison's state of mind in the last few lines where Jimmy explains to Alison how he remembers the first night he saw her, as Alison thinks that Jimmy is leading it to something positive in Alison which is something he never did before, and as Alison. I smiled, as if she idolised him and was in a daze because she was remembering that very night. Although, Jimmy wasn't leading it to something positive as he was really stating that in fact he thought she was relaxed, when she wasn't and she never had a hair out of place. I thought this was a significant moment in the play and wanted to portray this moment of realisation for Alison, which soon causes her to pour her heart out. I used emotional memory saying these lines as I felt this scene had so much raw emotion and heartbreak that we all wanted to show, and in the final performance I felt we all did that. In the script, in Alison's last few lines, it says she slides down the couch on her knees, and when rehearsing this, I felt it was uncomfortable and very unnatural, and I felt it would be natural of Alison to remain where she was. Also, in our final performance, where Jimmy says 'Don't, please, not any more...' Adam and I rested our heads on each other and held hands and cuddled which was something we had never done in rehearsals before, but we both did what we felt was natural for our characters at that moment in time, and we didn't expect it at all. At the end of the play, we thought it would be  appropriate to add our own little twist at the end, we decided that Helena would walk back in at the end to find Alison and Jimmy cuddling on the couch, we thought then Helena would feel as she did at the beginning of the play. I think if we were to make any improvements, it would have been really beneficial if we had more time to set up the set before hand, we would have felt more comfortable as we had rehearsed so many times in a certain way. For example, we had the living room including a couch, single arm chair, ironing board in the back ground and we also had a kitchen part where Helena would go up to the kitchen and make tea and do the dishes, and this was not something she could do as we didn't have time to set up the kitchen set. Also, if I was to make another improvement it would be that when I was so emotional, I think I could have maintained the accent more and pronounced certain words better, as I think I was being so emotional and I was trying to concentrate so much on the emotion that my lines were just flowing out, and I think if I had just slowed down a bit, it could have gone a lot better. Although I was really happy with the way we were all so emotional as that was one of the things we had worried about as we agreed to not be so emotional until our final performance so that it would seem more real, and I think that really benefited us. 

But all in all, I felt really proud of my groups performance and my class as a whole.