To try to act like my character, Jan, I have to change my facial expressions, body language and voice. I do this in various ways, when I start the play I am spraying on the wall; I need to keep an eye out for people so keep looking around I need to try and act shifty. I do this by fidgeting a lot When Mark surprises me I turn round and hide the spray can behind my back, to make it seem as if I haven’t done a thing, I also smile very sweetly. When I realise who it is, I walk over and do what is supposed to look like some kind of special handshake, this is to put across the fact that I am a tomboy. As we start talking I start to get more and more frustrated by Mark. I show this by frowning and slouching more. I soon start to get very defensive and start to approach him as if to warn him, also at one point I go right up to him and I put my face very close to his. This can be seen as very threatening behaviour in a confrontation.
With my voice changes, I do the sweet and innocent routine, I talk in a very shocked voice, I am quick to respond and raise the pitch of my voice slightly. When I act over excited to see mark I raise the pitch of my voice again. When I try to put across frustration, I raise the tone of my voice and lower the pitch. At the end I say ‘I’ll make sure of that’ I do this by almost muttering it.
Problems we faced during rehearsals were mainly trivial such as distractions from over groups, absences and finding the energy on Thursday lessons because it is just after physical education and I am usually exhausted. Bigger problems was mainly that I was having a lot of difficulty with lines, I was getting lines confused I soon sorted this out though by going through my lines at home, and highlighting keywords in Darren’s lines and associating them with mine so I remember my cue and what my next line is, for example, Darren says ‘What’s it all prove’ and I take the word prove and associate it with my line ‘It proves…’. Another trivial problem was we had sorted out this bit where Mark threw his bag at me and then I threw it back, the only thing was its size, it is a huge army bag and was filled with rags for effect, this made it very hard to throw and catch. We solved this by only passing it the once I could throw it better than my partner and my partner could catch it better than I could.
The lighting we used was supposed to look like outdoors, we used whites floods lightly, yellow white and orange soft edge Fresnels quite brightly and a small amount of green soft edge Fresnels. The set we used was basic; we had a board with a bush painted on it, and a table used as though it was a wall. We used this setting to show it was outdoors and so we had something to move to and from, when I was spray painting I pretended to do it on the curtains. The props used was a couple of bags, one was an old army bag. We used this to express that Mark had just got back from the army. The costumes were quite basic; I wore my school trousers, a red T-Shirt and a Leather jacket to make it look as if I was part of a gang. My partner wore his school trousers and a blue T-Shirt, he wore these because they were basic and sensible looking.
Our final performance went quite well, I did get a bit disorientated, and I stood too far away from Mark and the centre of the stage for the best part of the performance, I was worried about forgetting lines but fortunately this did not happen. I was pleased with how it went; it did go a lot better than rehearsals. If I could have changed anything it would have been how far away I was the fact that I had forgot my trainers and the lighting because there was difficulties in getting the camera to see us both, it looked odd me standing outside supposedly and not having shoes on, and there was a bit we had planned for our lighting were all went down except a white profile light was shining on me and mark commented on my clothes this was too draw attention to the fact that I had changed since Mark had last seen me this could not happen though because the person who had done this for us previously was absent. Overall though, it was a success.
