The company on show day. (Noble, 2017)

Going into the final performance of our show, I was a little nervous about how it would be received. Because comedy is a genre that is highly dependent on audience response, it was impossible to know whether the show would be a success before the actual performance, since things that made us laugh during rehearsals and the development of the script wouldn’t necessarily amuse an audience who weren’t privy to that process before watching the end product. As with any show, during the development process, the company acquired various “in-jokes” amongst ourselves that inevitably subtly alter performances during the show and can sometimes totally change how an audience will receive it.

Thankfully, the audience responded very positively to the show, laughing and reacting in certain instances where none of us had anticipated receiving any reaction. One instance of this came when I entered with my line “It’s called culture! You’d understand it if you tried!” (Briggs, 2017) while wearing my “final stage” costume (Fig. 1), which during rehearsals hadn’t seemed to be a particularly funny moment but which had much of the audience laughing.

Fig. 1: “It’s called culture!” (Noble, 2017)

As an actor, it was immensely gratifying to feel such a positive energy and response from the audience during the performance, particularly since I’m not really used to playing such a comedic role. However, it was certainly an exciting challenge and one which I feel I managed to achieve successfully. One of the biggest challenges was simply adapting to the size of the stage on which we were performing, since having spent the process rehearsing in smaller spaces, I had become used to “performing softly”, despite the nature of the show being very farcical. However, during the rehearsals on the day, I found I was quickly able to adapt my style to suit the larger space.

Overall, developing this show and the character of Alex has been a long and occasionally tough process, but through plenty of collaboration between the writing team, the director and the other actors – as well as the company becoming very close-knit in general – I feel as though I was successful in overcoming the challenges that I was initially confronted with and was able to develop and create a real and grounded, if somewhat stylised and over-the-top, character.

Works Cited

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

Noble, R. (2017) Record ’97. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre Company

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.

After having created the backstory and a firm personality and set of characteristics for each character over the last few writing sessions, the development process with regards to the acting has become much more focused. Now that the actors all have a firm set of guidelines to work from with regards to how their character would interact with others, the process has moved from simply improvising scenes within an abstract and hypothetical world with characters that are always subtly altering depending on the whims of the actor, to beginning to improvise scenes within the world of the show that we are creating with a view to later potentially adapting them and adding them to the script.

Because not everyone in the company has performed together before working together in this module, there is still an element of the actors ‘figuring each other out’, though we are all visibly a lot more at ease and seamless with each other now than we were when the development process first began. Our individual styles of comedy have also managed to blend together so that when we are working on potential scenes and interacting with each other in character, there is a significant improvement in the interactions whereby they flow a lot more smoothly and allow us to keep the improvisation going on far longer than we could at the start of the process when we were all acting far more on our own individual wavelengths, whereas now we are acting far more as a cohesive company working towards the joint goal of making the show as good as it can possibly be.

Each actor has come up with a list of about ten bullet points for their character to keep in mind while we’re improvising potential scenes, which helps to keep us grounded to the world of the show that we are creating and also what our characters motivations are. It also in many ways allows us more freedom during these exploratory improvisation workshops since as actors we are, in a sense, permitted to be more adventurous with the scenes and the characters’ interactions since we always had a baseline of reality to help to keep the situation grounded and stop it from becoming too outlandish even when we push the characters to be as over-the-top as we feel we can make them.

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.

Right at the start of the process of developing our debut show, we decided as a company that we wanted to write our own scripted comedy that would be set in a previous decade – which, after much discussion, we eventually decided would be the 90’s since a lot of the events that happened in that decade are still affecting or have strong correlations with events that are happening now. 

Since we had decided to write an almost “sitcom-style” comedy, and such style revolves around interesting characters being thrown into interesting situations, our first few company rehearsal sessions were all about the actors thinking of characters and situations that might be of use to the writing team. We each took part in a hot-seating exercise where we formed the bare bones of our characters (in particular their name and relationships to other characters) and were then paired off by the director and given a situation to improvise a scene with each other in order to see which characters ‘gelled’ well together (at least in their current fairly stereotypical and basic forms) and work out what potential plots could arise between them.

These improvised scenes helped to unlock the potential of our chosen characters since they were kept very simple – a pair waiting for a job interview, two people meeting after being arrested, someone losing their keys and asking a stranger to help them to find them, etc. – which allowed the focus to be placed on the characters we had each individually created and the possible relationships that could be formed between them; something that could help inform the general plot of the show and also our characterisation going forward.