In what way was your character developed through the drama process?

AS and A Level Drama

Name: Michael Sims

Candidate Number: 8178

Centre Number: 56515

In what way was your character developed through the drama process?

Working in such a small group meant that there was a great deal of multi-role acting required. The dynamic of the play, which involved a number of disconnected scenes, resulted in us not having fully ‘realised’ characters, but ones which were used as tools for us to use in order to communicate the relevant themes. And so, when we were developing a character, we began with an idea which we wanted to communicate, and then worked a character into this.

For example, the character of the suicide bomber did not begin life as a suicide bomber, but as an idea of how construct a scene. In this case we wanted to hear the thought track of someone placed into a traumatic situation. After much trial and error the idea of a suicide bomber came about. With this character we would be able to give an insight into a mind ‘different’ from almost every other character type, and so would have been of great interest to the audience.

Unlike many of the other characters in this play, we were not able to base the suicide bomber on anything that we had seen on television or in films as this is such a new character type, and there has so far been very few attempts to recreate this. And so, we proceeded to build this character from scratch with the little knowledge that we had on the subject. We performed a great deal of hot seating in order to come up with the thought track that we thought was ‘right’. By making a setting, and thinking about the external factors on the character, such as his family, his reasons for taking his actions, and generally building a full history for the character, we were able to interpret his actions in terms of what had affected him. From this we were able to put the character in our chosen scene and know how he would react and think. This surprisingly effective method allowed us to gain an understanding of a character which we, at first, seemed like a very daunting task.

Although this character did take a lot of work to create, the most time spent during the writing of the play was taken up by the creation of the three journalist characters. With these characters we put huge amounts of effort into creating their histories, crafting their relationship and creating a dynamic where all three could work as a collective. These three were our only fully ‘realised’ characters and by the end of our work on them, we knew them so well that it would have been possible to base an entire production around them!

Looking back it ...

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Although this character did take a lot of work to create, the most time spent during the writing of the play was taken up by the creation of the three journalist characters. With these characters we put huge amounts of effort into creating their histories, crafting their relationship and creating a dynamic where all three could work as a collective. These three were our only fully ‘realised’ characters and by the end of our work on them, we knew them so well that it would have been possible to base an entire production around them!

Looking back it seems strange that we spent such a large amount of time and effort into characters which would be only appearing on one scene, however, it paid off, and we were able to show three characters that had actually been shaped by the events that they had been involved in, which was the reason that we had wanted this scene in the first place.

After we had first conceived the idea for the scene a very basic format was devised, this showed my character, Danny, as a reporter out of his depth in a war-torn country and treating his job with very little respect, a contrast to the dedicated Malcolm and Kate. In this simple state, both characters and scene lacked any depth and so became very tedious and predictable. The first step in improving the scene was to work on the relationships between characters, however, in order to do this we would first have to understand the characters and how they antagonised each other. By thinking about and writing a basic character history I was able to begin to know the personality that I was trying to convey, and so understand how to interact with other characters. Although this was a simple task, it did make a difference to how we acted with each other, however, a great deal more work would need to be done in order to keep the audience engaged during the scene.

Building upon the character history that I’d written we began to do a number of ‘hot seating’ activities. The subject matter of these ranged from talking about my history as a reporter, to when I had first arrived in the war torn country and also discussing my feelings and relationships with the other characters. This proved to be an extremely useful exercise as opposed to sitting down an writing a history, I was able to talk and react as my character, which is a much more natural process when spoken out loud. What also proved to be useful was being able to ask other members of the cast questions while they were doing their hot-seating, this enabled me to understand the feelings of other characters towards mine and so was able to play on these reactions on stage. Although we could have discussed these histories while being out of character, this method allowed us to conceive attitudes and feelings which came naturally and would not have necessarily been thought of out of character.

When it came to the point that I felt that I had learnt all that I could about my character by using hot-seating methods, I decided that it was time to reintroduce him into the scene and gauge how the increased understanding had aided the performance. We discovered that this background work had helped in a number of ways. Firstly, we were able to interact with each other far more easily that we had before, this is simply because we knew how to react as our character and so could quickly respond and know that it was not out of place. Also, during the more intense sessions, we had begun giving the characters mannerisms and quirks which fitted their personality. With these on board I (along with the other cast members) was able to make the character more interesting both to watch and play. The increased understanding of the characters no only allowed us to ‘understand’ them better in our heads, it also gave the scenes more meaning as more depth was added to their characteristics and mannerisms.