Initial Reading:

Reading the play for the first time with no real understanding of context was very confusing, I got a very uncomfortable sense of tension. Since the play doesn’t set itself clearly and doesn’t explain itself early on, I felt very lost but curious. The lack of clarity made it seem as though this story exists outside of normal human events; it made me want to read more. I really enjoyed the tone of the play, it was funny but felt uncomfortable and tense at the same time and how the tension came from really small occurrences such as pauses or looks, it felt as though everyone was on the verge of snapping but couldn’t allow themselves to.

I really enjoy Agatha’s character, I find her balance between being this calculated and dominant monster and her yearning, lonely side is very interesting and would like to see how they combat each other.

Another character I am equally interested in playing is Huldey, a complete contrast to Agatha and nothing like anyone I have ever played before. She is almost feral yet completely dependent on the affection of others. This hunger morphs her childlike front into something much more sinister. First time reading she seemed tragic to me however, after reading again, it seemed like I gave her exactly what she wants. She is very intentional with what she does, everything is calculated, her tears are strategic, despite not getting what she wants, until her act of violence at the end which now seems inevitable. 

Casting:

I was cast as Huldey! I have never played a character like her, she is a lot older than me yet much more emotionally immature, her complexity is very intriguing but also daunting. At first glance she appears childish and dramatic but she has so much more going on underneath, she experiences emotional starvation, she is completely insignificant in her world and has to see her sister get everything she wants. She feels as though the drama that she expresses, which pushes people such as Emilie away, is what will make people like her. This role creates a new challenge for me, creating humour from horror, I believe she isn’t trying to be funny, the humour comes from when she is the most disturbing.

Research:

Through my research into the expectations of women at this time period and gothic themes I see Huldey as a character aligned with the Gothic ‘in-between’ world of the moors. She is shaped by the isolation she experiences rather than societal convention, she embodies the strangeness of the moors. Seeing Huldey as belonging more to the Gothic landscape than to society informed my decision to portray her as emotionally underdeveloped and instinctive rather than morally conscious. This research directly influenced my performance, it made me think less about performing her in a way aligned with socially acceptable behaviour.

Understanding the world of the play:

During the first week of rehearsals, we spent time going through the play, uniting and making decisions about character relationships, to create a mutual basic understanding of the play and its characters for us to build upon.

I have often been unsure about using uniting, as I have previously found it restricts my freedom within scenes. Huldey is very up and down as a character, her emotions are all over the place and can be changed very quickly. I worried about playing her on one note or only changing how she feels when she speaks or is given a direct cue. However, after these first couple days I have found uniting very useful, as it encouraged me to approach the script from her perspective rather than my own or the audience’s, allowing her emotional shifts to feel motivated rather than random. Having each shift, not just the ones that are about Huldey, highlighted helped me to pick out moments which would shift her mood. For example after coming back to scene one and feeling as though I am just playing her as excited and off-putting to Emilie, I decided to look back at our uniting and detailed work where I was able to find moments in which Huldey would feel as though her spotlight has been taken and can therefore sulk, like when Emilie fusses over the Mastiff. Originally I played this as though she is still just excited for Emilie’s arrival and is just passively watching, however the final product showed Huldey rolling her eyes, fidgeting and looking annoyed over the lack of attention on her, before snapping back to being overly invested in Emilie. This also helped me to show the more gothic side of Huldey which I was hoping to portray, everything she does is completely manufacture to get her what she wants and she is actually a lot smarter and more manipulative than anyone would’ve thought. I continued to find moments like this in the script by looking at our uniting and detailed work and found a lot more interesting moments. Such as the moments where Huldey tries to suck up to Emilie and get empathy from her by acting timid and dramatic such as when she says “nobody ever sang to me”, “I’ve never seen anything”’ and “I’d like to see London.” I decided to play these lines as though Huldey has found another perfect opportunity to victimise herself, she puts on a sad tone, lowers her pitch and speaks slower, toning down her usually overly dramatic persona (despite still being dramatic, just in a different way) to trigger guilt and compassion within Emilie. These moments are usually accompanied by Huldey then snapping back to her original self to show that it is all an act in an attempt to make people like her. 

This process has really helped me understand uniting better and find ways in which I can actually benefit from it, I will be using it a lot more in future projects. I think it works best for me when doing it in a group so I am able to get a better understand how everyone else and their characters feel about the situation and about my character which is another really useful element to understand about my process.

Character Process:

I wanted to start this process by using technique which I have found very useful to making sure that I am aware of everything the play tells me about my character. I went through the play and found everything that is said about Huldey, whether that’s directly from her, the writer or other characters. This allows me to make sure I am not getting confused between who my character actually is and who other people perceive them to be, which, especially in Huldey’s case, are two very separate things. I wanted to do this first to make sure that I am not starting this process off with incorrect intentions or ideas that aren’t based on exactly what my character wants.

I found that pretty much everything Huldey says about herself is a tactic to get sympathy. It’s interesting to see that this doesn’t work at all in Huldey’s favour based upon everything that I could find from other characters. The only nice thing said about her is a pleasantry said by Emilie, a compliment which isn’t even her own opinion, instead one that is passed on and is incredibly vague. 

One issue that I have always had when creating a character is that I have many different ideas and I want to use them all, so much so that they begin to overlap and contradict and my performance becomes less truthful as I am focusing more on what looks best and shows my acting off the best rather than what serves the narrative. I found this happening specifically in scene one. There were a lot of moments where my character would be observing and forming opinions/trying to find a way to interject, I found that every time we did this at the start of the process I was doing something different every time, not making notes of these changes, and not deciding which suits Huldey best. It got to the point where I felt as though I was sat there with no real motivation as I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what that was. Therefore, I used Uta Hagen’s 9 questions, a technique, which I found out in my last project, is really useful to me. After answering these questions I was able to make solid decisions about Huldey and her objectives and motivations, allowing me to focus less on analysis of the script and more on active engagement within the scene.

I was thinking less about trying to understand how she feels and more about being present and connecting with the other characters which made me much more confident in my performance moving forward. To extending this work further, I used this information to help my find my Given Circumstances and Objectives for my scenes, some Stanislavskian techniques which have been a vital part of my process to further add logic and drive to the scenes I’m in and to create a more truthful performance. Using these added a whole new layer to the scenes, my acting felt a lot more authentic and I was able to explore and push my ideas to create some really interesting moments. This change resulted in clearer objectives in each scene, which secured my ideas and made Huldey’s unpredictably feel calculated rather than erratic.

Physical work/warm ups:

A physical technique which I have wanted to explore more is using some of Laban’s work to create my physicality. I particularly found his efforts useful, and after trying a few to see which worked the best, I decided on Wring as Huldey’s main effort. She has so much pent up emotion and feels so many strong feelings at once, Wring felt like the perfect option. Keeping that feeling inside was exactly the feeling I was looking for with Huldey, she’s feeling desperation for a friend, fear of anger and excitement towards Emilie all at the same time. After applying this, I felt such a shift to my performance, as the internal tension of Wring supported Huldey’s emotional unpredictability and created a more complex physicality. I found interesting ways of standing, sitting, and how she’d walk, it also provided me with a lot of range vocally.

Directors Feedback:

I sometimes struggled to work around getting majority of my feedback for scenes one and two and less for scene 4 as that was the scene I had less lines for and therefore was just reacting. I found it best to ask questions when I was unsure about this scene, which was met with constructive feedback and reassurance. A lot of my feedback regarded muscularity of my words which I worked on with my accent teacher and implemented extra articulation warm ups until I got good feedback on these moments. For me the feedback really helped me to be braver, I was met with praise towards my own ideas which I thought were too much but I learnt through this that, especially in regards to Huldey, more is definitely more, which made me have so much more fun exploring this role.

Overview:

Looking back at this process, I am incredibly proud of my growth, the contrast between what I thought the final product would be at the start of this process to now, is huge. I have solidified my understanding and ability to use techniques and my confidence to play. As I had so much success with my process during this project, I plan to use the techniques and the confidence gained during this process to contrasting roles, particularly those that are more serious or purposefully comedic, in order to test the adaptability of this process. Moving forward I would like to get used to uniting more and work on doing it by myself as I found it so useful as a group. I would also like to put more faith in myself from the start of the process, I feel as though I could’ve explored this further but, due to time constraints I was unable, however if I dove in straight away without feeling scared to do too much, I might’ve been able to find new and exciting elements to Huldey that I hadn’t considered before.