When Jake enters the roof, he is ‘clutching a satchel’, which implies that rather than just carrying the bag, he is holding it very closely to himself, as if he is using it to hide behind. As he walks across the roof he is ‘familiar & comfortable’ with his surroundings, & the roof is described as his ‘secret hideaway’. The audiences’ presumption at these actions is that he likes, and is used to being by himself. Jake is a very antisocial character, he is very protective & he likes to keep himself to himself. We know this because when another character called Polly enters the stage, he refuses to talk to her, and acts very defensive about his writing. ‘You can’t just stroll up here & start reading things willy-nilly’, ‘This is my place! Go away!’.
The second character’s entrance I will study is Natasha’s. When Natasha enters onto the roof, the stage directions describe how she looks. She is wearing the same uniform as Polly, but Natasha’s ‘skirt is much shorter’, her ‘shirt is bright pink & unbuttoned to reveal some cleavage’, and she’s wearing stilettos. The way she is dressed, suggests that she craves attention, and dresses this way to get people to notice her. It also seems like it is a mask for her to hide behind, like her way of keeping people at arms length, so they don’t know the real her, or what she really feels.
Her actions in her entering scene tell us a lot about what her personality is like. As soon as she has stepped onto the roof, she ‘takes her perfume from her handbag and sprays herself’, then just after, she ‘takes her lipstick & face compact and starts to retouch her make-up’. This shows her to be very vain about the way she looks, and nervous about what people think of her. But she also seems insecure and vulnerable, and as if, like I said before, she is hiding behind a mask. She acts very confident in herself, which reinforces the view that she wants to be the centre of attention, although I believe it is fake and that she is in fact really self-conscious. She is very domineering and bossy, we can tell this because of the way she acts towards people, and what she says. For instance, she tells Polly to ‘park her lips’ when she tries to talk, and Natasha thinks she can tell her who to be friends with, ‘red alert! You’ll be hiding between the dustbins before the term’s out’.
The way Jake acts in this scene gives the impression that Natasha intimidates him because throughout the conversation between Polly and her, he doesn’t say a word. But, when he does talk to her, it’s like he idolises her, ‘And no matter what style it always looked…oh, so perfect.’ He sounds almost infatuated by her hairstyle because he goes into so much detail about the way he admired it and how different it is once it had been cut, ‘…it’s like you’ve lost part of you’.
As the play goes on, the characters personalities change a great deal, and linking back to the introduction, they rise above the stereotypes and they see each other in a new light. Some of the roles reverse, for example, Jake becomes the leader of the group, the centre of attention. And Natasha is quite happy to sit back as if she doesn’t need the attention anymore. On the whole, this play teaches a valuable lesson, to not judge a book by its cover