Developing The Characters

Posted on March 5, 2017 by Morwenna Murray

During our various company rehearsals and the time we have spent workshopping ideas for our show, we have continued building the characters we began developing at the start of the process through hot-seating and improvisation exercises. The characterisations have been placed firmly in the hands of the actors with the writing team following actors’ thoughts and decisions in the sculpting of the show. We have kept up the process of pairing up characters or creating group situations within improvised scenes (Fig. 1) to see how various characters could respond to and interact with each other – a process which, in turn, helps to strengthen the characterisation beyond the very basic form it had previously taken and helps it to develop and evolve into something a lot more substantial.

Fig. 1: Amy, Catherine and Kim improvise a potential scene for the show

It also gives us the unforeseen added benefit of making sure that we as actors are adjusted and adapting to each other’s senses of humour and usual styles of comedic acting, since some of us are quite good at making sarcastic one-liners and others are good at more physical types of comedy. It allows the company as a whole to see the actors’ individual strengths and the more improvised scenes we do together, the more people even subconsciously adapt their styles of comedy to suit their scene partner’s, even if it means using a style of comedy that they aren’t personally used to using. This sense of working together bodes well going forwards since the style of comedy that we want our show to be won’t be successful unless everyone is on the same page with it and fully committed to putting aside their own personal comedic styles and stepping a little out of their comfort zone.

Mapping A Plot

Posted on March 4, 2017 by Jack Briggs

During one of our last sessions we began to plot the structure of the play; the events our characters must tackle, and how and when to insert humour. This was a difficult task because we needed to do this in order to start writing and generating material, but we only had the basis of our plot and sub-plots. The focus instead shifted to the characters for the purpose of finding what they wanted to achieve, and what qualities we could touch upon to create drama and comedy. This is a notion discussed by Rib Davis:

“Perhaps the starting point is a story idea, and it immediately becomes clear that for the story to work it will have to have a particular sort of character at its centre; then as that character is developed, an element of it suggests a new direction for the plot” (2016, 69).

In order to generate the sequence of events that would unfold, we had to first build upon our characters to develop a sense of direction for them and their own plots that ultimately impacted the central plot. We expanded on each character; their backgrounds, their behaviours, and their sense of identity, to what they wanted to achieve. From here we discussed possible scenario’s and plotlines involving each character that could be put into the script, and now it is a case of testing out these scenario’s in workshops to see what happens. From here we should start to see the basis of our script.

Works Cited:

Davis, R. (2016) Creating Compelling Characters for Film, TV, Theatre and Radio. 2^nd Edition. London: Bloomsbury.

Developing the World

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Jack Briggs

“Why does Beckett put in the detail he does? Could we cut with impunity? Why did he put in so much? Come to that, why did he not put in more? And why should he have stopped when he did?” (Paul Lawley, 2008, 3)

During recent sessions our Dramaturg Elif has had us discussing the nature of the world our characters inhabit and what it means to them.

It has been agreed that our play should have a Waiting for Godot-esque vibe to it, in the sense that our characters don’t exactly achieve anything. Part of the conundrum with achieving this was figuring out why our characters cannot leave.

This led Elif to asking what the record store represents; a home, or a prison. From this we were able to determine that for each character it was ultimately both, as for some there is something tethering those to the building, and to an extent this same tether makes them want to leave. In future sessions we intend to continue exploring this theme to develop the plot.

Lawley, P. (2008) Waiting for Godot: Character Studies. London: Continuum.