Over the past academic term, I have worked with an actress Claire Eden and a director, Tyrell Jones. We explored a range of techniques that an actor can use to break down text and better understand the piece’s context. Throughout this portfolio, I will document the methods we explored, how they will help me, and how I will use them moving forward. I will also discuss some difficulties I faced throughout the process as well as the successes. 

Super Objectives

We started looking at The Bear by Anton Chekhov, which is a complex one-act play set in the drawing room of Popova’s, a recently widowed woman, estate after she locked herself away. Smirnov, who used to do business with her husband, tries to ask Popova for the money that her late husband owes, but she refuses, the play unfolds rapidly ending in a duel between them. We began exploring the play by focusing on the technique of super objectives which “serves as the final goal that a character wishes to achieve within the script”(Blackwater, 2013) whereas objectives are the “character’s primary motivation in the play.” (Ates, 2023). Tyrell explained that characters can have objectives which are goals they want to achieve as well as super objectives that occur throughout the whole play and tell us what they want to achieve by the end. Our task was to decide each character’s super objective, starting with Popova’s, which we decided was to seek revenge on her husband who was unfaithful to her. In further discussions, we agreed that Smirnov’s super objective was to find a reason to live. In my opinion, super objectives would help me as an actress to find an overall goal when thinking about my character’s development, however, I do not feel it would work for all scripts because not every text follows a consistent narrative for example Love and Information.

Objectives and Units

We moved on to identifying the character’s objectives, one of Stanislavski’s methods, which describes what the intention is for each character within a scene or section of the play. We did this by splitting up the text into units, otherwise referred to as beats or events, and deciding on the intention of a character within each of them. As you can see below, here is how I laid out my objectives and units in my script as well as in my notes.

“Units are portions of a scene; they break down the scene allowing the text to be manageable for you to decide what your character is doing during the unit” (Antonia, 2012). I believe units are a very useful way to divide the script and have a more precise idea of the objectives. Our task was to go through each scene and find the moment where our chosen characters’ objective changed, labelling these as units. I chose Popova and went through each event that we had labelled, and decided on what her intention was that led to a change of scene. As an actress, I felt this was very impactful when working on scenes with lots of characters because sometimes it can become very flat, worsening the storytelling when multiple people have dialogue. However, I think going through the script like this allows an actor to decide the moments of change where it would be most impactful to emphasise a certain line or to have a moment to pause. Since doing this exercise, I have used this technique when practising my repertoire for acting through song because within those classes we focus on the characters’ objectives throughout a song, and so being able to go through and identify the units and change of objectives has massively helped my ability to perform in that lesson.

Actioning

We then looked at actioning which “involves assigning an active (or transitive) verb to each of your lines to illustrate its underlying meaning or subtext” (McGowan, 2022). We did this by choosing a line from a monologue or lyric and assigning a verb and a physical action that represents the meaning. For example, I chose a line from a monologue from Oleanna by David Mammet which was ‘Who do you think I am? To come here and be taken in by a smile”, where I chose the action ‘I command you’ with a pushing forward motion. Although utilising an actioning verb helped me to understand the intention, I did not feel that the motion made a difference as it all almost felt too much and took away from the serious nature of the original monologue.

After doing this activity, we referred back to the script of The Bear where we worked in partners to go through a small section of the scene and put an actioning verb behind each of our assigned characters’ lines. This activity felt very helpful in terms of understanding the text and the way the characters were responding to each other. Overall I would use actioning in future work, especially when dealing with heightened emotions in a scene as it will help me to understand where the changes in emotion are, depending on the line.

The techniques we learnt with Tyrell felt very similar to the work of Katie Mitchell who also follows the naturalistic method inspired by Stanisvlaski’s work, in particular when discussing units. I studied Katie’s work a few years ago and was fascinated by how much the characters’ environment can affect the intensity of the emotions portrayed as well as the realism of the acting.

Creative approach to text

We began lessons with Claire Eden, looking at context and using a creative approach to text. For our first task, we were given a scene from the play Love and Information called ‘Secret’. The whole concept of this play is that it provides no context behind each scene and there is no indication that they are linked to each other, with no names, no stage directions and no setting. Therefore, in pairs, we were given the task of analysing the scene in detail to imagine a context for it by coming up with names, ages and relationships for our characters. We also made a Spotify playlist based on what we think our characters would listen to, as well as scrolling through Pinterest to come up with an aesthetic for each character. I found this activity quite challenging as we had absolutely nothing to go off of other than the words in the script and I normally benefit from having some kind of foundation to base my character’s intention on, therefore I found this task quite challenging due to so many possible choices.

Hot Seating

Later in this lesson, we exercised hot seating, using the context that we had just created for our characters in an attempt to gauge a better understanding of the character and their impact on this scene. Hot seating is where each person takes turns to be asked questions from the perspective of their character. By doing this, Emma and I were able to come up with a clearer backstory for the conversation being had in the scene just by asking simple questions such as “How do you feel about the situation?”. I found this extremely helpful especially in this scenario, working from no context, as it felt like a more natural way of discussing and finding out who we wanted our characters to be. It also helped us get into our characters and find out small personality traits that came out naturally when answering the questions, helping us to decide what we wanted to keep and what we felt wouldn’t have worked when starting to put all of these contextual elements together.

Vocal variety and Intention

For our next lesson, we looked at how a character’s playing age can affect their voice as well as the circumstances of the piece. We explored this by focusing on a different scene from the same play, Love and Information, which was called ‘Affair’, whereby two characters are discussing people they know who are suspected of having an affair. Jono and I started by creating a context for our characters and the scene like we had done in previous lessons, starting with names and ages. We decided my character, who we called Jo, was 30 and Jono’s character was 34 and called Ben. We then did some hot seating to find out the backstories of our characters and where we wanted them to be set. Eventually, we decided that Ben would be an overly camp man from Essex who enjoyed spreading gossip in the work staff room, whereas Jo was a quiet yet stern woman who seemed to know everything without giving it away but did not care to invest in the gossip.

We then looked at the vocal variety and how this can change the intention of the piece by using an exercise taught to us by Claire. This involved choosing a line from the scene and repeating them back and forth using a variety of accents, tones and volume. By doing this we discovered a change in intention for my character as I chose the line “Yes it’s all ok. Thanks though.”. Originally we assumed this would be said in a very kind manner, however by doing the repetition exercise, we felt there was a level of spite behind the line that could make the scene more interesting as it questions the relationship my character has with the person we are discussing. As you can see above, I went through the script labelling each of my lines so that I had consistency each time we ran through it as well as it being a useful tool to look back on.

A task that I found useful was when Claire asked us to walk around the room as she shouted out different emotions such as; anger, confusion, joy, fear and guilt while we changed our posture and movement based on those emotions. I discovered quite a lot about my posture as well as my facial expressions when I am not actively trying to exaggerate my emotions. For example, my facial expression when we were doing anger was very neutral and it had more of an effect on my posture and walking. I had more intention and a faster pace when walking as well as opening up my chest and tensing my hands. I have taken this awareness into my other classes such as Meisner where we are encouraged to be more honest with our emotions and let them show when we feel them when we are in an active exercise.

Bringing in our own text

For our final lesson, we had to incorporate all of these techniques we had learnt to do with context and intention into our own chosen script. Ellie and I chose to explore one of the pieces we had worked on in a class before which was a scene from Love and Information called ‘Fired’. In this scene a conversation takes place between two coworkers where one has fired the other over email, the person being fired is outraged by this however the coworker shows no sympathy. We decided on who we wanted to play first of all and then created a backstory for each character. My character, who was the younger employee, was being fired and believed she knew better and felt she had some sort of authority. Whereas Ellie’s character was the coworker who was firing my character who was a much older wiser manager for the company. We incorporated the majority of the techniques we had learnt over the past few weeks, the most useful for this scene was picking an emotion that we wanted to focus our physicality and voice on. I chose frustration, this helped me to emphasise the naivety of my character as I was not using controlled gestures which leant into the younger side of my character.

Conclusion

In conclusion, working with Claire and Tyrell to analyse scripts has taught me many skills that I will take forward into further work. The techniques that worked the best for me were creating objectives and super objectives for the characters throughout the play, as this helped massively with complicated wordy scenes that would not necessarily be clear without this technique. The other exercise that I found useful was the repetition exercise with Claire, where we chose a line from the script and repeated them back and forth using different actions, tone, pitch and volume. This helped me keep more energy throughout the scene as I do struggle with keeping the energy in my voice when I’m focusing too much on my physicality. This academic term has taught me a lot about how much you can get out of a single script no matter the context or given circumstance as well as how much objectives can change the intention of a piece.

Bibliography

Antonia. H. (2012). Units and Objectives. WordPress. [Online] Available at: https://heatheractingwork.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/units-and-objectives/#:~:text=Units%20are%20portions%20of%20a,changing%2C%20like%20any%20conversation%20does.

Ates. A. (2023). The Stanislavsky Method Acting. Backstage. [Online]. Available at:https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-definitive-guide-to-the-stanislavsky-acting-technique-65716

Blackwater. J. (2013). Actions, Objectives and Super-objectives. The Maydays. [Online] Available at: https://www.themaydays.co.uk/actions-objectives-and-super-objectives/

McGowan. E. (2022). Actioning in Acting: A Full Guide To The Technique. Backstage. [Online] Available at: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/actioning-acting-explained-75443/#:~:text=Actioning%20involves%20assigning%20an%20active,coined%20by%20legendary%20Konstantin%20Stanislavsky.