With the script now practically completed except for little edits that are being made in rehearsals, it is becoming increasingly easier as an actor to find the character, as it were. My character, Alex, is one of the most over-the-top comical and ‘wacky’ characters in the show due to her strange outlook on life (choosing to play a ukulele because “it’s edgy” (Briggs, 2017), using the image of a llama as a metaphor for society, as well as plenty of other things) and since I’m mostly used to doing more serious roles, it has been a challenge to tap in to the sheer weirdness and oddity of this character. However, working with a now mostly finished script is allowing me to properly track the journey of the character and see where I need to go and in what scenes I need to push the comedy, since there are several scenes where the comedy is inherent in the situation, where there is only one character onstage who is remotely “normal” and the others are all strange, or vice versa; and there are other scenes where we as actors need to perhaps increase our efforts to show the comedy in the writing.

Even though Alex’s backstory that the writing team created is very different than my own, I’ve found that I am able to bring a lot of myself to the character: being slightly quirky and offbeat when compared to most other people and finding it difficult to connect with other people except through a shared interest and struggling to work out how to get people to want to talk about things that interest me are all experiences that I have faced and that I share with Alex (though certainly not to the extreme presented in the show), which definitely assisted me a lot whenever I was struggling to ‘find’ the character. It also helped me to understand, as I said before, when to ‘push’ the comedy in a scene – one of my lines “I won’t. No one talks to me” (Briggs, 2017), said to Sebastian when he’s telling Alex about his crush on David, when said on its own is far more tragic than funny but through experimentation during rehearsals, I’ve discovered that saying the line sadly while still appearing to remain oblivious as to exactly why that should be the situation allowed the humour that was present in the line to shine through.

For further assistance at working out exactly how to play a character who is so wacky as Alex is, I examined similar characters from various sitcoms that I’ve seen – Phoebe from Friends, Abed from Community, and GOB from Arrested Development in particular since these characters all share Alex’s trait of viewing the world around them in a completely idiosyncratic way that makes perfect sense to them, but cannot be understood at all by the people they spend their time with, except for maybe a select few. This trait was especially pivotal to understanding Alex as a character, since she sees the world through the metaphor of a llama, which she thinks is totally understandable and which is explained in a scene that came straight from one of the improvised sessions near the beginning of the developmental process.

During this entire process, the thing I as an actor have been most conscious of is keeping Alex from becoming too over-the-top and cartoon-like since, once that happens, there’s no particular way for the humour to grow – “comedy, as has been extensively noted, is based in misery… As vicious as it sounds, no one will laugh if no one is hurt, whether emotionally or physically… The instant a character becomes a cartoon, they are unable to feel and, more importantly, unable to hurt…and so a fundamental ingredient is lost” (Lynn, 2012). Fortunately, I think that with the script having been developed in such close consultation with the actors, and the setting kept grounded by the referencing of real events that took place in 1997 (such as the general election, and the death of Princess Diana), it also helps to keep the characters grounded too, while still allowing for a few over-the-top moments.

Works Cited

Briggs, J. (2017) Record ’97. Lincoln.

Lynn, J. (2012) Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes, Prime Minister. Faber and Faber Ltd. Bloomsbury House, London.