Theatre Portfolio

Stephanie Gadsby Theatre Studies

At Home with The Brights

AS Theatre Studies Devised Piece Portfolio

Stephanie Gadsby

AS Theatre Studies Portfolio

Aims

The aim of this devised piece is not only to entertain our audience but also give them a little insight to 1800’s Victorian life in the way of showing, how middle to upper class people may have felt quite repressed in showing their true emotions sometimes, under their fear of losing face value in front of others. Most importantly, we want the audience to be able to relate to the Victorian personas in the performance and for them to see that similar issues and situations are still present in today’s society. For example; the pressure from a parent to a child or budding love between two people, both key issues between the characters in our piece and are both evident around the dining table scene.

At the end of the performance I want the audience to leave, both having been entertained and to also question their own values against the characters, thinking about other people’s perspectives, treatment of other people and self representation. In order for this to occur, they would have to feel each individual character’s different emotions throughout the piece; The annoyance on Nathaniel and Sophia’s part at Mrs Bright’s interruptions of a tender moment, The hurt of Mrs Bright overhearing her daughter Emily talking of her, Emily’s guilt having hurt her mother and the defensive manner Mrs Bright takes with Sophia creating constant tension between the two. If the audience can experience the same emotions as the characters, they will have engaged with the piece and will have been able to relate themselves to it as well as absorbing the “story” of the piece. This in turn, will prevent the piece from being just a meaningless piece of entertainment.

Inspirations

The inspirations for this piece have come from a letter that was actually written by Sophia Peabody to her father, in 1853, about her and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s visit to the Brights at their home Sandheys, in West Derby, Liverpool. The letter is filled with descriptive facts that we could incorporate to our piece and we found, when reading it, ideas about how to make our piece share some of the themes from our set text “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” quickly formed. The body language, movements, accent and projection of voice in Trevor Nunn’s adaptation of “My Fair Lady”, which i saw at the Liverpool Empire 23rd March 2006, have aided me in my own portrayal of my character, Mrs Bright. “My Fair Lady” uses physical theatre effectively so we have included a section of movements and gestures to show a pheasant shooting scene. By using this method, we are enabling the audience to use their imaginations instead of just placing everything on stage for them to see. Also reading Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” and watching the film, gave me more of a sense of the Victorians and what sort of people they presented themselves as. Wilde saw smugness, pomposity, self- righteousness and sense of duty as hallmarks of the Victorians. I have tried to take these things all into consideration through the portrayal of Mrs Bright’s character. As with the two latter productions mentioned, we have combined fact and fiction in our narrative. Through doing this, the piece will have more sense of realism for the audience to which they can relate more readily than if it is complete fiction. Also, before this piece, we were set a few acting tasks, one of which to be a monologue of our choice and the other, being a section from Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull” acted out in groups. I feel that my choice of monologue and choice of character in “The Seagull” have been beneficial to my present character, Mrs Bright, in this piece and my portrayal of her. In the segment of “The Seagull” I worked on, I played Arkadina and my monologue was taken from the film “Chicago”, one of the central protagonists, Velma Kelly. Both women are strong female characters and traits of their personas were inspiration for me and my interpretation of what Mrs Bright should be such as a confidence in social status and cunning over other characters.

Techniques

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Techniques

There will be many techniques used within our piece, not least of all; Stanislavski’s system will be used and by using this system, there will be more of an element of realism to the piece. However, this realism would sometimes be in an environment that required movement to depict its object, for example when the characters step outside for the pheasant shooting, I will use physical movements, gestures and facial expressions (possibly arms sagging a little as if they are under the weight of a gun, furrowed eyebrows to show annoyance of Sophia shooting successfully) to indicate the mood and emotions of the sequence. During this sequence, I will use Stanislavki’s “magic if” to explore how the characters would present themselves in this moment linking also to their “given circumstances” and hopefully through this, I will be able to show a sincerity of emotions to the audience. Throughout this whole piece, we have also used the technique of “units and objectives” to be able to make sure each section runs and leads on to the next smoothly.

“A broken statue or a slashes canvas is not a work of art, no matter how beautiful its parts may be”- Konstantin Stanislavski

“Tempo rhythm” has also been greatly considered throughout the piece as it is key to the piece to deliver lines and movements at a pace specific to both the character and emotion of scenes. Before we had a definitive piece, there were some workshops held in the class that would assist us with our pieces. Some of the workshops includes creating sound-scapes in groups, a yes/no improvisation game which showed us all that improvisation can only work when all participants are co-operative as it can hit a dead end when ideas are dismissed or blocked with “no”. We also played an improvisation game that solely depended on teamwork. It was called “building a shed”, and worked on the basis that one by one, people would walk to the centre of the room and mime building a shed. Whoever was already miming would have to adapt to each new person who entered and take on their personas, character and accents.

Themes

Our piece shares similar themes with our set text “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” such as jealousy, love, power and control, humour, conflict and history.

Jealousy: In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; Oberon, the king of the Fairies seems to be quite jealous that Titania has a little human child and he demands she give it to him. In “At Home with the Brights”; Mrs Bright, whose marriage is breaking down, is jealous of Sophia who is much younger, well travelled, more of a free spirit, has the love and affection from Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as Mrs Bright’s daughter Emily’s adoration. Oberon’s Jealousy drives him to put a mischievous spell on Titania whereas Mrs Bright’s jealousy makes her behave somewhat unpleasant towards Sophia.

Love: Obviously in our piece, Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne are in love with each other, but there is also a mother-daughter love. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, there is a tangle of love between the characters to begin with. Lysander is besotted with Hermia, who in turn loves him back. However Demetrius also loves Hermia and Helna loves him.

“The course of true love never did run smooth”

There is also love present in the friendships of this play, such as with Oberon

and Puck in a master and servant kind of way and the woodsmen and

Bottom.

Power and Control: Oberon has power over Titania when he puts the spell on her and is in control of her life almost, as the spell decides who she falls in love with. Mrs Bright seems to want to have control over Emily’s life all of the time. She makes decisions for her and is constantly criticising her. Around the dinner table, she is quite intimidating, and has power over all her guest that she does not even realise she has such as when she orders Emily to sit up straight for the first time, Sophia and Nathaniel also jolt straight too.

Humour: When the woodsmen put a play for Theseus’ wedding, it is meant as a serious tragedy but is so bad that it has a lot of hilarity in it. Although our piece is not overtly humorous, it is laced with some subtle comic moments such as the pheasant shooting sequence when Mrs Bright accidentally shoots the gardener after bragging she is quite capable of the sport.

Conflict: There is the initial conflict between Oberon and Titania over the boy in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and also the dispute between Lysander and Demetrius over their affections for the same maiden. In “At Home with the Brights” there is a blatant conflict between Sophia and Mrs Bright immediately but also there is building tension between Mrs Bright and Her daughter Emily as a result of Mrs Bright’s behaviour.

History: Throughout “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” there are references made to Greek mythology and throughout our own piece, there is historical content such as crimes of the age, Transcendentalism, make up and attire of women of the period all of which are subjects of conversation around the dinner table.

Research

The research I have collected and that we have accumulated as a group has put emphasis on our original aims. We wanted the piece to be seen as realistic as possible and as we gathered more and more research, we realised that we wanted the audience to be transported into the world on stage indefinitely so our research had to be thorough so we knew exactly what we wanted to portray and how we wanted to do it, there couldn’t be any room for slip ups where only our vague ideas will get us through because if this were the case, the element of realism would be dented in sections and therefore could be seen as disjointed going against the “units and objectives” method. We researched all of the things we could think of that might give us more of an idea how to perform from cutlery, interior, hairstyles, attire, make up, jewellery and hair accessories, transport around the time, theories and inventions of the time, opium dens, crime and literature.

All this research reinforced our target to portray realism and we wanted to incorporate the majority of it to give the audience the sense that we know exactly what we are talking about. However, we realised that if facts were just put in throughout the play, it would come across that they were just thrown in anywhere, and that would dent the realism of the piece also. We decided to eliminate some of them and only use the topics we think the characters would either be interested about or concerned with. We also decided that these topics would only feature around the dinner table as subjects of conversation for the characters, but after that scene the characters would move on and become engaged with their own events of the evening.

Bibliography:

True Crime – Jon Sutherland & Diane Camwell

The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde

Skill Development

As I have been involved with other plays and took GCSE drama, my voice projection has become reasonable through experience and I feel that as my character is a wealthy, well spoken women, I have adopted a medium pitch which I feel is right for the persona. I have a reasonable range of intonation when speaking on stage. I need to relax more on stage as sometimes my nerves get the better of me and I can dash through my lines forgetting about “tempo rhythm”. Through practice, I feel the pace of my speech has improved and is now more fitting to my character, who I feel would never speak too fast as the fact people at her dinner party, would have to listen to everything she said, even at a slower pace than usual gives her high status in the situation. I have a reasonable ability to pause at the right moments to provoke the right effect and atmosphere for whatever my character, Mrs Bright is saying at any one moment.

I feel I am confident in my positioning on stage in relation to the audience and other actors around me. I make sure I rarely if ever have my back to the audience and/or never block another actor from also being seen by the audience. Through this I have used and feel very comfortable with Stanislavski’s “Circles of Attention” technique which in turn has helped me with the use of the appropriate actions and reactions

Physically, I can vary facial expressions and hand gestures but do need to be less flamboyant in my body movements (this is due to forgetting about the character in question sometimes and just being myself, occasionally). I do think I have learnt how to use the correct paralinguistic features and mannerisms for my character such as a straight posture, the holding of my hands and the very composed walk down the steps to suggest both being lady like and someone who has high social status

I would like to develop my body expressions on stage more so I can separate the body language of myself and my character, leading to a more convincing character and more concentration on my behalf. I would also like to be able to accentuate believable emotions from the character so in turn would like to be able to use “Emotional memory” more effectively.

For my character, I tried to develop a very lady like and dignified but powerful stance. Also my facial expressions were not exaggerated but enough to suggest the thoughts of Mrs Bright. Through a quite stiff, tense and straight posture I wanted the audience to know Mrs Bright was quite uptight and intimidating. I also wanted them to see this through facial expression such as a slight turn of head when Sophia talks (Mrs Bright feels too much self importance to be polite to Sophia), and the disapproving pursing of lips and slightly raised eyebrow also and the smug smiles when she thinks she has made Sophia lose her facade with her cutting comments.

Piece Development

To begin with, as a group, we had a very basic outline to our piece and as we became more comfortable with it, we could add more material to the structure and concentrate on our themes and messages. There is no narrator in our piece telling the audience where we are, who we are why we are all together so we had to fill each section with as much as we could to indicate the answers for the audience. The first scene is vital to set up the audience’s expectations of our characters. We had to ensure that the dialogue between all the characters flowed and seemed natural but also supply the audience with enough knowledge for them to know what the situation is. For example, the conflict between Mrs Bright and Sophia is set up immediately when Mrs Bright will say something quite cutting to Sophia whenever she can throughout the dinner table scene. These comments always seem to come after Nathaniel has been complimentary about Sophia, instantly setting up the jealousy of Sophia. It soon becomes more evident to the audience when Mrs Bright attempts to go around the topic of Mr Bright, her husband, not being present at the meal. This hints and suggests to the audience that maybe her marriage is not all well and she is jealous of Sophia as she seems to have what Mrs Bright wants.

During the majority of rehearsals, the group worked really well together. Everyone was co-operative and driving in the same direction (maybe on account of close performance deadline). Everyone felt comfortable enough to suggest new ideas but also speak out if there was something they didn’t feel quite sat right with our piece. We were all prepared to try out new things that others suggested but equally not afraid to go against something. We were able to give constructive criticism to each other and not take it personally. Any decisions made, were put to the whole group and all contribution was welcomed. However, there were a few rehearsals when the group didn’t quite work at best together. Either as a result of two or more group members being overcome by stress and therefore uncooperative or a general lax attitude leading to wasted time messing around. On the whole we have worked brilliantly together.

At first, we were all concerned that our piece would be quite dull for the audience to watch as it is not set in the modern day and originally the bulk of the play would have been around the dining table as we were going to have the characters all eating dinner together. However, we soon realise that an audience could tire of watching the same thing for roughly 25 minutes so we changed the dinner so now it’s the end of dinner and they are only sat around the table for a short while. We get up and move around, we move “outside” for the pheasant shooting and Nathaniel and Sophia walk around the audience during their walk in the garden. Even when the characters enter the house again, we don’t all sit around the dining table together. This is because we want to keep the audience’s attention and whilst they are watching, we want them to be a somewhat passive audience.

My personal contribution to this piece has been very active I feel. Within the group, I was someone who often put forward new ideas and solutions to problems we encountered. I have been involved in the practical side also, suggesting and gathering props and pieces of set. I have also tried to keep the group motivated and assured during rehearsals. I thought the Pheasant shooting scene would be effective for the audience and originally suggested that it was a sound scape but we developed it into a choreographed sequence that still will look effective.

Health & Safety

We kept our rehearsal space fairly tidy so as to limit the number of risks to health and dangerous objects that could affect our safety. We made certain that we were always either supervised or a teacher knew exactly where we were. Within the group, we always made sure there was at least one mobile in case of the need for emergency calls. We noted all fire exits and assembly points to go to. On the set we used fire proof paint and made sure that at no pint, there was any obstruction to any fire exit. The physical side to the performance meant we had to be aware of any potential body injuries, especially strains and pulled muscles. By warming up before rehearsals, we ensured there would be no risk of pulled muscles through jerking or straining them too hard.

Progress through Pictures

This is the necklace that is to be worn by Sophia, a gift from Nathaniel. Admiration from Emily, but disregard from Mrs Bright

These are the two hair pieces that are to be worn by Mrs Bright, Emily or Sophia, and the ribbon for Nathaniel’s hair.

Discussion of ideas taking place between group members.

An awkward moment at the table when Mrs Bright has excused herself after overhearing Emily’s declaration of hate for her mother.

Emily and Sophia talking fondly of travel.

Appendix