How did your role emerge and how was it communicated?

When we were choosing who would play which characters I was at first a bit unsettled about playing the part in the wheelchair as I felt it would be a huge challenge. I opted to try because I could slightly identify with the character as my Aunty is in fact in a wheelchair, which meant I could talk to her in order to give me confidence in my movement.

To help me experiment different ideas with my character I decided to improvise in order to try different ways of structuring the speech and to allow the character to develop. I wanted to character to seem real to the audience so I used a technique called personalization. This meant tapping in to experience from my own life and applying the emotional impact of the experience to the acting scene.

I wanted the audience to be shocked by the monologue and what the character said so when writing the script I kept it short and to the point in order to create that effect. I broke down the scene into beats and established variation for each beat using emphasis, movement, volume and energy. I did this to communicate the emotions to the audience.

To draw the audience in I spoke and looked directly at them throughout the monologue and to captivate their attention at specific parts I leaned forward in the chair. I wanted the audience to concentrate on what the character was saying so I made sure that when I was speaking the movement was minimal.

When I initially started rehearsing the monologue on my own, I played the character as very bitter and recluse. The more I practised the more I felt the character needed more to it in order for the words to gain impact with the audience. After showing it to people I gained advice and decided to change the way I was playing it. Instead of being so withdrawn and bitter I decided to have the character talking almost normal as if what she was doing wasn’t wrong or out of the ordinary. By playing the part this way it made the audience even more shocked when they found out the truth about the character.