“Imagine me in a cathedral town, why, the very rooks in the trees would find me out even if I could stand the dullness of it” I showed this in my swagger in my walk and my costume, wearing dark red lipstick, and a long black skirt underneath a long black velvet coat with an outrageous red streaked fur neck trim.
When I first acted through the scene I found it difficult to react to the things that were happening because we had not yet learnt our lines, and I could not build the tension and atmosphere with my acting. I read over the script again several times, but this time focusing on what mood the lines were setting and how to react and build the right atmosphere, Doing this really helped me interact with the others in my group and it also helped with stage directions, needing to change heights and distance from each other and the audience in order to increase the mood that the action gave.
We often worked in two separate groups in order to save time and each of us focused on our parts, Helen and I practised our duologue on our own a lot as it was the most emotional part of the scene and we needed to catch the audiences attention, but we found that not working as a whole group created problems because we didn’t have everyone’s opinion to help, and also we were not confident in knowing each others work, we started to work as an entire group, commenting and helping each other. This was much better, also it gave us definite knowledge of what the staging looked like, and we could edit some of our moves and spaces. We worked well together and quickly,
Process Journal
As a group we first found it difficult to find a way that we were happy with, the main problem was the staging, because it was set in an office and the scene was quite static and movement less we found trouble in making the play interesting to watch, we really didn’t want to be sat down all the time and sometimes ignored stage directions that told us to. We worked around this by using different heights and using the space well, not always sitting down and changing pace and distance with the atmosphere of the script. It was quite hard at first because we had only just got to know each other, and it is important when acting with someone to know how they work, but I think that the play made us work together and any problems we had we helped each other with. We all found it difficult to learn lines and often spent extra time going through them with each other so that we could concentrate on our actual performance in the lessons.
The performance went really well, we stuck to our plans and only a few errors were made, I was quite nervous but used the feeling to fuel my characters emotions. Everyone except me had a few last minute adaptations to their costumes but they were only minor and they definitely helped our characters take full form.
Devised scene
Our devised scene was about three peoples lives, them visiting their psychiatrist and their problems and secrets. In our devised scene, we deliberately made our characters the opposite of our roles in Mrs Warrens Profession in order to give each member of our group contrast and show each of our wide variety of acting skills. For example Helens character in Mrs Warrens Profession; Vivie, was stern and cold hearted, especially toward her mother and she only cared about her work. In contrast to this in our devised scene Helen played Dianne, who was selfless and compassionate and devoted her time to others. We wanted to create a scene that had a relationship to Mrs Warrens profession but that was not based around her job but the morals shown through the play. Our group talked about the effect that the secrets had on the relationship between all the characters, especially Mrs Warren and Vivie. We decided to show the lives of three people that were interlinked; Mother Sandra, son James and teacher Dianne and use a psychiatrist to show their secrets to the audience and how they hindered their relationship just as in our set text.
When our group first worked on a short piece of our first idea for our devised piece we played around with the idea of having a stylised set. In every scene the set would stay the same; three tables with chairs behind them in a row, one for each character. It looked good and gave variation from the set of mrs warrens profession and it was practical too. Later on we decided to use black wooden blocks because they looked better than chairs and also we could hide any props that weren’t being used behind them.
Process Journal