'How would you wish your audience to respond to the characters of Lollio and Alibius? Explain how you would direct your actors to achieve this aim?'

Essay – Number Two – The Changeling – Direction of Alibius and Lollio

‘How would you wish your audience to respond to the characters of Lollio and Alibius? Explain how you would direct your actors to achieve this aim?’

The characters of Lollio and Alibius are in the play, ‘The Changeling’, to add an element of comedy to the Jacobean Tragedy by Middleton and Rowley. I feel that they have been put in the story to add a lighthearted approach to the main plots heavy themes and issues. As a director I would aim to create these characters, of Lollio and Alibius, as likeable due to the un-likeable characters of the main plot. This is so I can create comic relief for the audience to respond to. I would pursue the path of creating comedy through contrast of the two characters. Alibius the head doctor of the mental asylum is an intellectually challenged and is extremely easy to impress. He is also always absent from the mad house. Though Lollio his right hand man, a cured patient of Alibius’, is always there to look after his ‘flock’ of mad men. He is a very sexual man who never fails to talk his feelings to some one he is after. He also gets and ego boost out of the power he has in the mental asylum by fooling with the mad men’s emotions and feelings. I want the audience to like these two characters so that comedy can be installed. I want to achieve this by directing the players involved to create comedy through contrast due to the battling of the characters status’ and personalities, hoping to create an archetype relationship. I want to achieve this by contrasting their vocal characteristics, general body movement, body shape and size, costumes, personalities and their physical looks and hair. It will also require the directing of keys moments of status battles and archetype moments. Thus creating the relationships between the two characters. This is how I aim to direct my actors so that the audience will react to the comic relief.

The contrast to create comic relief, I would first require to cast the roles of Lollio and Alibius. In Alibius I would look for an older actor to play the part, who looks intelligent, most probably with glasses, and maybe an Einstein look alike with absolute crazy looking hair. He would be vertically challenged in height size, would have to have a speech impediment and have a stutter with a pompous nasal speaking voice at a very fast pace. He would always looked like he was in a rush somewhere or the other, though doesn’t really know what he ...