Juror number 4
This man is a Well-educated, smug and conceited, well-dressed stockbroker. The 4th juror is a man that is exceedingly clever and very rational compared to the others trying to vote guilty, he shows no prejudice to the defendant and is very willing to listen to the other side of the argument unlike 3 and 10. 4th is played very well by ed Armstrong he really gets into character, he sits in the same position for over an hour just as the actor in the movie. Ed played his character to the movie which is a disappointment because I would rather have seen his version of 4 not the actors.
Juror 5
The 5th juror is a very insecure person, he is from a slum dwelling and therefore the case only brings back bad memories, this is why the juror says very little because it just reminds him of what he has tried to leave behind. The 5th gets offended very easily especially when people remind him about his slum background like the 10th juror. Charlie played this character quite well but I think he wasn’t really feeling the character he didn’t put any emotion into his lines he just recited them to the audience. “I have lived in a slum all my life” this line is especially said badly he pushes all the words together instead of putting emphasis on slum and life. He didn’t really have much characterisation so his character wasn’t really appreciated.
Juror number 6
Number 6 is a manual labourer he is a painter, he provides the backup to 8’s evidence. He is a sad character that doesn’t really know whether the kid is guilty or not. He shows respect for his elders and is ready to fight over the old man in the courtroom. He 6th was played well by Chris Buley, he spoke his line quickly but he put emphasis on the parts that needed it, but he also was very good at getting angry and he then was good at turning round to the old man and calmly says “ go ahead you say anything you want to.”
7th juror
this juror is an obsessed baseball fan who has no respect for anyone not even the defendant and shows no respect for the immigrant worker. He exceptionally arrogant “buddy for your 3 dollars a day you should listen to everything” he is talking to the 6th juror when 6 tries to shut him up.
8th juror
The 8th juror is a man that is driven by justice and he could be named as a do-gooder. He shows great courage when he stands alone against the other eleven jurors. He is very confident on his speech and is also extremely logical. He uses logic to defend himself against 3, 7 and 10. For example he uses logic when the 3rd juror says he is going to kill him he says “you don’t really mean you’ll kill me do you.” The 8th juror doesn’t really have many friends in the jury room, he gained support form the old man early on but I couldn’t class him as a friend. Chris played this character very well he really got into character. He stood up straight and he walk confidently, also when he talks he talks slowly and methodically I would give Chris and nine out of ten for characterisation it was a shame that he didn’t learn his lines.
9th juror
this man is the oldest in the group, I think he relies on other peoples respect but unfortunately doesn’t find any apart from 6. Luke played this character and I think he did a good job he had a good old mans voice. His characterisation was good he remained in his seat for the majority of the play which is what the old man did.
10th juror
A garage owner, who simmers with anger, bitterness, racist bigotry; nasty, repellent, intolerant, reactionary and accusative; segregates the world into 'us' and 'them'; needs the support of others to reinforce his manic rants. This character is very hostile he has a prejudice against slum kids although his reasons are unclear, maybe he was robbed or something but I think the main reason is that he voted guilty and hates to be proved wrong and that is why he is so stubborn with his opinions.
11th juror
A watchmaker, speaks with a heavy accent, of German-European descent, a recent refugee and immigrant; expresses reverence and respect for American democracy, its system of justice, and the infallibility of the Law. This juror lives on morals he gets angry with the 7th juror when he suddenly changes his vote because he changes his vote because he wants to get home. The 11th juror is also very quite and still he always has his jacket on and is always smart even when he is hot and bothered he shows no signs of getting hot or bothered throughout the whole play. Seb played this character I think his accent was good but his characterisation was not as good I could see him getting fed up and he should have shown his character as always paying attention and always alert to the situation.
12th juror
Well-dressed, smooth-talking business ad man with thick black glasses; doodles cereal box slogan and packaging ideas for "Rice Pops"; superficial, easily-swayed, and easy-going; vacillating, lacks deep convictions or belief system; uses advertising talk at one point: "run this idea up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes it." This character is very indecisive he has no personal feelings about the kid but just doesn’t know what he wants because when it comes to the late stages in the play he changes his vote many times and shows how little he thinks before he acts. Ricardo played this character well but I wasn’t completely satisfied with how he dressed and how he sat he was meant to be a business man and therefore used to sitting in an office and should therefore be happy to be in a chair but Ricardo kept moving around.
Influences:
What was my character like; well he is a sports teacher at a high school, so I tried to incorporate this in the way I acted. My character I think was being held back by the burden of being foreman, he loses his temper quickly because the last thing he wants to do is be in a jury room but the worst part is that he has been made foreman. My character says quite a lot at the very beginning and so I needed to rehearse these parts a lot and making sure that I put emphasis on the right parts also I had to be very careful that I didn’t just ramble on because that is not what this foreman is like. He tries to make himself look important and gets very angry when people don’t follow the system that he has formulated. I wore white socks to try and put across the message that I am a sportsman and not an office worker. Also near the beginning of the term we did some mask work which helped a lot to formulate the body language that my character needed. I put a mask on and sat in a chair at home and tried different postures and filmed the process and decided myself which was the most convincing. I found that it was one that started off well presented and smart but after fifteen minutes of arguing in the jury room I would stop trying to look smart and slouch down on the chair, and also when I was being talked to I would try and look smart and educated. The mask work also helped me with my walking I would be walking like a sports teacher with a wide stance and my shoulders upright to look as big as possible, many of the businessmen would walk thinly if you know what I mean, I would walk widely due to the fact that I am not used to walking down corridors and round chairs in an office. In the term we also studied Stanislavski he basically said that just to deliver your lines with emotion and loudly you need to get emotional experience to be good at a part and to be believable. I looked at my part and thought that I have never even been near a jury room and I sure as hell haven’t been a foreman. This is why older actors such as Anthony Hopkins are better actors than younger ones because they have had more experiences to fall back on in their acting. If I have had no experiences of a foreman how can I imagine and be a believable foreman, well if I haven’t been I foreman what have I been, I thought what does a foreman do; I thought that a foreman is basically a leader and I have been a leader I sure have been and unsuccessful one like in learning together day. So I tried to draw from that experience. Also I think that I got a lot of influence from the film that I saw, Martin Balsam was the low key character, firstly I wanted to see what I thought the foreman was then I would build on what my idea of the foreman was. I thought the foreman was a bold character but I saw the film and saw that he was a more of an inexperienced juror who preferred to be out on the sports field rather than be in the jury room. I also studied Brecht and I saw that I didn’t want people to feel emotion when I speak I want them to think about what I had to say. Although saying that I didn’t want to teach my lines I wanted a mixture between meaning and emotion in my lines, because I think that I needed to get the message across but I also needed the audience to see how much stress people were under and therefore I had to put certain emotions into my lines. I studied Pinter and his play the “caretaker” this taught us about how important pauses were and in the play there are a lot o characters on stage and they don’t all talk at once so I had to use the silences to try and display how hot I was and how fed up I was with the courtroom but not too much so that I kept the audiences attention on the person that was speaking. Whilst being on stage I had to get into character in a number of ways I would use my tie to wipe the sweat off my forehead and I would also go and occasionally get a glass of water from the cabinet, all this is trying to show the audience that you are a convincing foreman.
Location of the play:
The play is situated in a jury room the room is very hot due to the fan being broken and because they are in a high story building they have no open able windows. This means that the actors as well as being in character also have to try and convince the audience that we are hot and bothered this may mean in my case that I mop the sweat of my head, also I might undo my cuffs and I might loosen my tie this all amounts to how much the audience is convinced. The play is set in the 50’s all the jurors come form different backgrounds but all have something in common they are all jurors. The jurors have just come out of the courtroom and are very hot and they are very uneasy they have just been sitting down for ages and they now have to go and decide the fait of a young slum kid. The play takes place in the summer, the day is the hottest one of the year the play takes place in the afternoon straight after coming out of a courtroom.
What?
After the jurors retreat into their little office in the back of the courtroom, there's a sense in the air of a dead-set verdict: the kid's guilty. But after a hand vote is taken, Juror 8 is the only one who votes not guilty. This is all it takes to set off a battle of wits, between the lone man who wants to further investigate the point out the holes in the evidence and the group of eleven others, some of whom voted guilty simply because they want to go home in time to catch the big game. 8’s intention is to force his fellow jurors, to see that they may possibly be sending an innocent young man to his death, while the racist Juror 3 nearly goes insane trying to hold up his discriminative opinions.
Staging:
Our stage was simple we had a grotty background colour, as our back wall on the right of the stage we had a set of cupboards and the main entrance and exit. All this is painted in a browny green to try and portray that to be in this room is utter hell. There is a table in the centre of the room which was in the shape of a rectangle except it had rounded corners, the table had a pad off polystyrene so that we could stab the knife into the table without having to use a real knife. The table was a dark brown all the rooms colours were dark so that we could highlight the window which I think shows how much everyone wants to get out of the dark into the light. Everyone sits around the problems as you can see we all sit around the table which means that the jurors at the side block the 2 behind him and therefore the juror has to sit miles away from the table.
when we were using freeze frames which we did everyone would freeze with their backs to the audience and would be silent a light would shine onto the people talking in our case they were in the toilet.
Evaluation:
The play was a disaster if we were being marked by the script because we missed a lot of the script. I went out on stage very worried about my lines, I got out there and tried to get focused on my characterisation, which meant I sat down and started to tear up pieces of paper for ballots. I soon did this and I then undid my cuffs and rolled up my sleeves, I delivered my first set of lines which ended at about page 15, I then thought what would my character be doing and so then I thought that I am sports teacher and I would be uncomfortable in a office environment and so I decided to move around a lot and mop my brow along with loosening my tie to try and give the audience the impression that it was hot. We had cigarettes on the table to try and add to the affect of the grottyness of the room. I had already delivered a large proportion of my lines and so I was relaxing and then craig forgot one of his speeches and cleverly improvised which then messed up everybody else’s ques so then Seb said his last line for some reason, but we soon got back on track and we recovered and then we lost it again and Chris had jumped so many pages that we had no hope of trying to recover where we were in the script. So everyone knew the script and so we all improvised and gave all our arguments in our own personal way. I think this actually worked a treat because I think that we all got to be our own version of our character and we made up our lines considering what our character might say. For example I would butt in every so often saying “let’s go in order” because my character is the kind of person that gets angry if he has devised a system and people don’t stick to it. We had to act out all of the script in our own way so we missed quite a lot of detail out which I think was a good thing, because I am always half asleep when we reach the end of our act so I think that it was good that we missed out detail because I think we kept the audiences conscious. I think my weakness was that when I got angry at number 10 for calling me a kid I think I said my lines too flatly I should have gone up and down more. I think that my characterisation was good I was moping my head I undid my top buttons and cuffs I also kept moving in position to give the audience the impression that I was uncomfortable in a office. I thought that I was a convincing foreman, I had white sock s to show I was sporty, and I soon gave up looking smart as though I wasn’t used to being in a suit so I think that I haven’t ever acted better.
If I was to try and change some thing about the play I would change the stage I think we couldn’t have picked a worse stage design. I think we should have had a table going outwards and lengthways like in the diagram below. I think that this stage design would work a lot better because the audience at the side would not have a obstructed view, also I think that the foreman should be at the head of the table because he is the one who is trying to keep everything organised. Also the script is designed so that jurors confer to each other over the table not along it.
