Throughout “The Three Sisters” we follow Masha, Irina and Olga’s attempts to move to Moscow. This becomes an obsession to them but as a result of a passive approach to life, they are still not in Moscow at the end of the play. This notion highlights one of the most prominent themes in the play; loss and exile. They feel a sense of loss because they feel that they lost their “happy” childhood lives in Moscow and as they never managed to return to Moscow, they feel somewhat exiled from there.
We decided that the theme of loss and exile was also prominent in our play as two characters tell the story how they have lost people who are close to them and one character eventually becomes exiled from the group due to status change.
As well as what we had studied in school, we also felt the need to carry out some research into the way criminals are presented in popular media and we gained a lot of inspiration from books, plays and films.
Some of these films included “Pulp Fiction”, “Reservoir Dogs” and “Snatch”. All these films have a dominant “gangster” theme. From these films we were able to start to gather ideas of how our character would talk, move and if there were any idiosyncrasies that were typical “gangster” behaviour. However, although we found this very useful, our personal characters began to lose some of their individuality due to the stereotypical presentation of criminals in these films.
To prevent this from occurring we decided that some alternative research into crime was essential. One member of our group read an autobiography of an Australian criminal, Chopper, and found a lot of insight for his own character from this book.
I researched a short play by Harold Pinter called “The Dumb Waiter” and this inspired me to concentrate on the comedy aspect of the play. Harold Pinter’s writing usually follows everyday conversation, or even what can be described as conversation for the sake of conversation. This type of writing is Harold Pinter expressing his views of social interaction and how sometimes humans can be very pointless in their behaviour, and this can be very humorous. I thought that if we presented our criminals in a very humanistic and contradictory manner, for example being shocked by recent crimes read in the newspaper, this would have an immense comical impact in the play whilst also showing that these criminals are not stereotypes but “real” people.
Preparation, Pooling of ideas and my own Contribution
A large proportion of our preparation was based around character building exercises as we felt it was extremely important to have unique individual characters that were not entirely stereotypical to the gangster genre.
We first all wrote a short description of our own characters, describing our personality and giving some basic background information of our lives. We felt that these character summaries were relevant to use in the play at the beginning. This was very effective at creating atmosphere and was a good technical device, as we didn’t have to introduce each other in a conversational manner. This method of introducing the characters was slightly reminiscent of the popular film “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”. The character introductions went as follows:
Skitz: “This piece of lean meat goes by the name of Skitz. Let me give you something of a first impression; when he was just 17, he caught his mate fuckin’ his girl. He grabbed the closest thing to him, which unfortunately for his mate happened to be an axe. He proceeded to hack his mate to pieces before throwing the girl out the window. A friend in a high place discovered his “talents” and he has been working successfully in the inquisition business ever since.”
Dave Brixton: “Dave… Dave Brixton, poor bastard got put in to care at age 5 and then into the nut house at 15. Word is they did something to him, don’t quite know what but they certainly knocked a few screws loose. When he got out he had discovered a love for explosive situations, if you know what I mean. They say he joined the IRA for a while, you know; just for a laugh.”
Chopper: “Chopper gets his brass to feed his kids by taking other people’s kids, and believe me his kids are well fed. If you are ever so unfortunate to cross his path, literally lock up your daughters, cause they’ll be worth a pretty penny; if not your life.”
Spud: “If God in heaven came down to Earth and walked the streets of London as a street fighter, he would not beat James “Spud” Green. Spud was a drifter; he had no home and no family but he was well known in the London underground. He was called Spud cause he was an ugly bastard, but you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the kid.”
Obviously these would need to be read out by one character in the play. This was Steve’s job. It was established in the first scene that Steve is the one who got the group of people together to do the job and therefore we felt it was apt for him to introduce the characters.
After all our character descriptions were finalised we decided to go and prepare our character’s specific history for our next rehearsal where we carried out a “hot-seating” exercise. This exercise allowed each member of our group to learn everything about our character, their status compared with each other and it also gave us inspiration to how we were going to link the characters lives and relationships. We came up with this diagram to show this.
Having our characters established and their relationships with each other decided on, we began to improvise scenes. This was helpful as we began to express our status and the way in which we acted towards each other. We also began to build on the physicality of our characters, developing movement, idiosyncrasies and voices. Although this helped us develop our characters we found that we all moved and talked very much at the same pace which led to any action on stage being very one dimensional. To avoid this we decided to do some very intense workshops on Action (Stanislavaski).
Action was one of Stanislavaski’s more important elements of the system. According to Stanislavaski there are two types of action; action for the sake of it (outward action in it’s physical form) and action that can be seen as action due to a concentrated stillness on stage (inner intensity). Stanislavaski noted that there is never a point where an actor is onstage and is not engaged in the process of enactment, but at the same time he suggests that there always must be a purpose.
“Do not run for the sake of running, or suffer for the sake of suffering. Don’t act “in general”, for the sake of action; always act with a purpose.”
In other words every action onstage (inner or outer) must have a reason. Why am I coming through this door? What is my purpose? What is behind this door? How might I approach the door?
To adapt this idea to our rehearsals, we used our given circumstances (character histories from hot-seating exercise) to give reasons for our action onstage and our behaviour towards others.
Our first exercise was to practice entering the space for the first time in the play. We wanted our individual characters to be shown in this first moment so we had to find a way of entering the space at different tempo’s and with different ways of walking. This exercise gave a very unique movement to each of the characters and therefore added to the group dynamics.
Once we had adopted a way of moving we all moved about the space and interacted with each other in a way that reflected how we felt towards each other in the play. The purpose of our action towards each other was how we felt about each other. In doing this we were able to develop how our body language, the way we talked and looked at each other would represent our relationships.
This Stanislavaski method was also useful because everyone was onstage a lot of the time but not always engaged in conversation. The idea that you should always be in a process of enactment when onstage and with a purpose helped us still have energy when we weren’t talking.
From doing this we had improved individual characters but we became very disorganised, as we had no definite structure to our plot, only the raw story. As we knew the basic story of the play we decided to use the Stanislavaski method Units and Objectives. This involved us splitting the play into units of action, each unit containing the main objectives.
This was very useful as we now had a structured piece and we didn’t become confused in which order certain events happened. To make sure we didn’t become disorganised again we devised a rehearsal schedule, which we were to stick to strictly. This schedule showed us up to what point in the play we had to work to by what time. This made sure we completed the piece in time.
In our rehearsals we decided to give monologues if we had an emotional speech. When this happened, the character delivering the monologue would walk to the front of the stage whilst all the other characters were in a freeze-frame. Our primary reason for doing this was because we thought that gangsters wouldn’t reveal their emotional and vulnerable side to each other but it was important for the audience to see this because it showed that these horrible gangsters were really human.
Prior to the dress rehearsal, we began to erect scenery and gather props. As we wanted our set to look realistic and we’d decided our set should really resemble a basement (where we’d decided to set the play). To achieve this we wanted to actually stage it in a basement or under a stage. We weren’t able to do this because of Health and Safety reasons so we had to make some changes to the drama studio. We used 3 wooded chairs, a desk, a drinks cabinet, a stereo and a television. Props onstage were a bag of golf clubs, spirit bottles, ashtrays and maps stuck to the back wall. I felt that as this play had to be as realistic as we could make it I felt that we needed authentic looking guns. These were very difficult to find as most cap guns are made to look very fake these days because of the public fear and caution of guns. I had to go to a Sports/Hunting shop and buy two blank firing guns. This was worthwhile as these guns sounded awesome and looked very realistic. There was only one exit and that was on the back wall.
When establishing my character, I had to focus on his history. Spud is the youngest member of the group (19) and is the get away driver. He parents died in a car-crash when he was two. He lived with his Gran but when he was old enough to leave has been living rough. He has a reputation for being tough and therefore is very cocky.
I didn’t convey my feelings about my parents dying until my monologue as I felt my character wouldn’t be open with the rest of the group. This is why when I said my monologue everyone else on stage would freeze while I told my story to the audience.
When rehearsing my monologue, I found it particularly difficult make my emotions seem real and not forced. I decided to employ Stanislavaski’s Emotion Memory.
“Just as your visual memory can reconstruct an inner image of some forgotten thing, place ore person, your emotion memory can bring back feelings you have already experience.”
Any emotion you have ever felt is stored in memory, and you can use this memory to relive the emotion.
To rehearse this aspect of Stanislavaki’s system I found a memory-provoking stimulus. I then acted out a small improvisation (without words) to express the emotion behind the memory. I did this several different times, each time conveying a different emotion. I chose the memory and emotion that would best fit my character’s monologue and reconstructed the circumstances to match my characters life. I then found I was more able to deliver a convincing monologue when using my own experience as a stimulus.
I delivered my monologue in the end with in an angry away. I thought this would convey that he isn’t grieving over his parents but is angry with them for leaving him!
Another aspect of my character was that he was very cocky and as it was decided that my character and another would dislike each other, I felt this would be a good opportunity to use what I had learnt using Stanislavaski’s ideas on Action. In the first part of the play I didn’t say much so I decided that my inner-energy would be focused on the character I didn’t like (Skitz). This resulted in negative facial expressions and negative body language towards him.
Personal strengths and weaknesses and the whole piece as a whole.
We are definitely happy with our final piece but personally I feel that if we could have had more time to actually write a script and perfect the performances it could have been excellent. We were all very committed and towards the final rehearsals made sacrifices to attend. Everyone in the group contributed to the development of the play and we eventually ended up with a piece of theatre that satisfied our initial dramatic aims.
One of my strengths was that I was very self-confident at voicing my ideas and my opinions of other’s ideas. I felt like I contributed a lot to the final performance as I developed a lot of the story line and character links. I would often watch the others when I was not onstage and act as a director, commenting on stage positioning and proposing ideas for the actors to use. I don’t think I gave any criticism that wasn’t constructive and I felt that I encouraged rather than discouraged the others when acting.
One of my weaknesses was that I sometimes felt under-motivated and I felt like we wouldn’t finish the devised piece to a stage where we would be displaying our ability. After I had announced my feelings, the group then came together and our rehearsals became a lot more organised and structured.
With regard to my character, I feel that he was successfully developed as he was unique, had many different emotional sides and interacted with the rest of the characters. One of our main dramatic aims was to break the cliché of “gangsters” and convey to the audience that these were real people and I feel my character satisfied this aim.
Another one of my strengths is the physical side to acting and I love choreographing fights. My character and another have a fight in the play so we decided to choreograph a fight that would look convincing. I have always been interested in physical theatre and have done lots of stage fighting before. In the end, I thought that the fight scene was one of the tightest and most exciting scenes in the performance.
As a whole group our main weakness was that we found it very hard to stay focussed, as we are all very good friends. We overcame this problem when we began to realise that the play wasn’t as good as it should have been. Group strengths involved the sensitivity in which we regarded each other’s acting and our ability to work well in a group. When improvising a scene for a first time, we always found that it was very funny. Although we wanted something comical we wanted to use black comedy, as we wanted to convey a serious side too. This sometimes became difficult as sometimes jokes were milked throughout the performance.
In our group we managed with to satisfy all dramatic aims and objectives as we had a piece that was both comical and serious. We all were able to break the stereotypical image of a criminal and instead opened the audiences eyes to a homosexual psycho, an unstable interrogator and an incompetent boss.
Health and Safety
During preparation and rehearsal we took certain measures to ensure that our acting space was a safe environment and that all props and the set had been checked for any potential hazards.
Smoking: We made sure that several ashtrays were present on the set and in each ashtray we put a small amount of water in to make sure the cigarettes are distinguished.
Guns: As we had very realistic guns we had to take several precautions. When we weren’t rehearsing they were stored in a safe place. When using the gun we had to be careful that we didn’t hold it close to our faces or point it directly at people as the guns made sparks when fired.
Rostra: These were weighed down by stage weights to prevent them from toppling over.
Lighting: As a main concern in theatre, we got our teacher to check over the rigging to make sure it was safe.
Bibliography
1)
2) Chekov- The Three Sisters
3) Harold Pinter- The Dumb Waiter
