Theo Bawtree 

Introduction

This term, I have learnt many different useful exercises to utilise and enhance my performance in a range of different scripts and scores. Utilising these wide arrays of theatrical techniques has progressed my acting process deeply and with this portfolio, I will go into the specifics of how various exercises have affected me. I will talk about Walking the text linked to theatrical practitioner Cicely Berry, World Building, inspired by Konstantin Stanislavski and Uta Hagens 9 questions. All of these have affected my development in one way or another, and this portfolio will show where I have honed them into being most useful and how I can progress with them in my arsenal going forward. 

Walking The Text

Tackling Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Claire showed us a technique called Walking the Text. This method is linked to theatrical practitioner Cicely Berry. Walking the text means breaking up the text, using the punctuation given to understand in this situation, with Romeo and Juliet, how Shakespeare intended the lines to flow. When we hit a comma, we changed direction, when we hit a full stop we paused, and when we hit a question mark, we did a 180-degree turn. 

Although I was sceptical at first, this exercise worked well for me as it allowed me to visualize the breaks and thought changes in the text. Another reason this works well in my process is that I have a bad habit to rush through lines when performing longer blocks of text. When reading through with these considered breaks in the speech, it allows me to push past this bad habit and instead showed a considered way of shaping the text at hand. I also have now started to mix up the actions of the punction, for instance, jumping when I see a comma etc. Mixing up these has helped keep it fresh for me and it helps putting different actions to different vibed pieces. For instance, if a monologue is high in energy, a jump may be fitting, however if its more laid back, a turn would work better in this case. 

When rehearsing texts in the future, I now know that if I get into my bad habits, this is a good method for me to break the text up. And I will particularly focus on this method while tackling heavier texts such as Shakespeare, so I can truly understand the correct thought changes and momentum of the writing. In week 8 of our Actor and Text lessons, we had a session on ‘Song vs Monologue’. I was looking at two iconic pieces of theatre in their own right, ‘Macbeth – Is this a dagger’ monologue from Macbeth and compared it to ‘Javert – Stars’ From Les Misérables. I tried using ‘Walking the Text’ for both pieces as a cold read of just the words. When reading Macbeths soliloquy, I found it greatly beneficial to my understanding of the text, and whilst doing this exercise, I started to get some ideas of how I would perform this monologue, using the text and punctuation to enhance my performance. When trying the same thing on the song ‘Stars’, I did get a clear idea of the text but it was not as beneficial to me on performance ideas, as I believe to honour these iconic musicals scores, the information on performance, is in the information in the score, not in the words alone. Many of my favourite musical writers such as ‘Claude-Michel Schōnberg’ write in such detail, I felt this exercise would not help me to perform any songs. Putting it to practice for this lesson showed me that this is something that works well when reading through monologues, but not something I would use to rehearse songs. 

World Building 

Konstantin Stanislavski is often referred to as the one of the most influential, pioneering theatre practitioners in the modern era. Stanislavski’s system is summarised by ‘Cloé’ states that “A method of actor training that encourages actors to deeply explore a character’s motivations and circumstances to deliver truthful, lifelike performances”. The pillars Stanislavski discussed are; Emotional Memory, The Magic if, Objectives, Super Objectives, Given Circumstances, Subtext, Physical Action and Through Line of Action. These are all helpful for acting choices, however world building, goes into the same level of detail, but discusses the context of the show, and using the information we have about the time of the performances, allows us to start making choices, employing Stanislavski’s system. Without context of the piece, we cannot make appropriate choices. The first musical text we looked at in our Actor and Text class was ‘Me & My Girl’. Stanislavski says in his book ‘An Actor Prepares’. “Create your own method. Don’t depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.” With this in mind, we looked at world building by tackling four key topics of the era that felt important to us, looking over the ‘Politics of the era, ‘Fashion’, ‘Music’ and ‘Money’. 

In our first R&D week of the year, I was lucky enough to be put into ‘Victoria Gimby’s’ ‘The Gap’, a piece of theatre based on the cutting down of the sycamore gap tree in Northumbria. This week we spent working on lots of the distinctive character relations. Using world building exercises became vital to this show as it covers so many different timelines, ranging from the Romans to modern day, also looking at a vast majority of social backgrounds and how this influences their relation to the iconic sycamore tree. Using the world building exercise allowed me to have a clear understanding of my interpretation to the context of the characters in the show. I worked closely with two different scenes throughout the week, Caius and Marcus – A roman solider with his Slave, And Julian and Clara, a couple from the time of the Industrial Revolution. This week allowed me to see the benefit of world building in an academic scenario for Marcus and Caius, deepening my understanding of their role in the show, and helped my performing as I played Julian in our final showing. I believe the world building exercise greatly helped the choices I made on stage giving me a truthful and thoughtful interpretation of Julian. 

Uta Hagens 9 Questions 

In our first week of Actor and Text after we did a table read of ‘Punk Rock’ we were put into small groups to work on some of the scenes from the show. To prepare myself for this I used ‘Uta Hagens 9 questions’. These 9 questions are; 

• Who am I? 

• What time is it? 

• Where am I? 

• What surrounds me? 

• What are the given circumstances? 

• What is my relationship? 

• What do I want? 

• What is in my way? 

• What do I do to get what I want? 

Philips says “These nine questions are not meant to be answered once and forgotten. They are tools for rehearsal, character journaling, and performance consistency. Uta Hagen believed that truthful acting comes from internal discovery—making the role one’s own rather than copying an external model.”  

Having these 9 questions as a basis for approaching this text in my opinion works very well to portray a naturalistic performance. Uta Hagen says in ‘respect for acting’ “All tedious research is worth one inspired moment”. This underlies the importance of knowing everything about the character you are portraying. In my opinion, to embody a character you must know these 9 questions inside out and everything else outside of it. To play a character is to become a character, which means living and breathing their lived experiences.  

When looking at punk rock in class, I looked at the character Chadwick Meade. Following her guidance, I answered the questions these ways for Chadwick in scene one of Punk Rock;

• Chadwick Meade
• 11am
• A sixth form common room, in a grammar school in Stockport
• Surrounded by desks chairs, books and bags. Lots of students moving all around him.
• Students talking before a teacher arrives, a feeling of academic pressure as mocks are coming up. Characters aged 17-18. Standard school room settings. (Which sets up the later conflict and violence to be more shocking)
• Socially excluded to his fellow classmates. Physically in the group but emotionally feeling separate and alone.
• Chadwick wants to be accepted and respected by his peers, but underlying this wants to belong in a group.
• Chadwicks obstacles come from being disregarded by his classmates, the overwhelming disorder of this chaotic common room, and his personal rigid need for control, this separates him from the group instead of earring his acceptance.
• To get what he wants Chadwick tries to assert his intellectual superiority over his classmates. He imposes rules to his peers, positioning himself as both morally and intellectually superior.

Having this knowledge going into performing this scene in class was eye opening as it showed me how many underlying themes and different subtexts can be played with different characters. These 9 questions took me around 20 minutes of work in class, and it showed me how much detail you need to start getting into, to really understand and become these different characters. Because of the work I did, my feedback for the scene work showed that it was clear I understood my character well, and can only continue to benefit from good portrayals of different characters as I continue to do more research.

Uta Hagens 9 questions is a thorough exercise that allows me to fully immerse myself in characters. I was singing an iconic song ‘Somethings Coming’ from Berstein’s ‘West Side Story, in an acting through song class recently. I have had this song in my repertoire for several years but have never properly researched Tony’s character and his motivations for singing this song in this moment. In musical theatre we know that when something is too important to say they will sing it, somethings coming is exactly this, it is an explosion of energy. When I first performed this song, I had not done enough preparation, I got notes like “too recited”, it needs more “arrogance” and “Where’s Tony”. This feedback was well deserved and although there were some nice comments, I was not finished with this song, and I knew there was work to be done. 

I took this song back for my end of term formative singing assessment, the progression was large, and this was because of my context and understanding of the song. I wasn’t just reciting words I had learnt in the moment, I was starting to embody this iconic character, using Uta Hagens 9 questions. My feedback read that my energy was now “excellent”. Although this song is a work in progress for me, I now understand the importance of character research for all performances, and that not doing all the work will often lead you to getting caught out in live performance. This improvement has shown me what the bare minimum is to portray a character authentically and Uta Hagens 9 questions is now fully adopted in all my rehearsals for acting through song classes, and general performance for the future. 

Conclusion

In Conclusion, my work in actor and text has been a unique and incredibly beneficial unit to my progression as an aspiring actor. The methods spoken about in this portfolio are three very useful tools, for which I have in my actor’s toolbox, and I will continue to use and develop each one to progress my journey. I have found that every experience we have looked at in our actor and text lesson, even ones not spoken about in this portfolio have all been useful in their own right. Some excersises I have adopted fully, others I have altered, and a few I have put to one side as they have not been assessable to my rehearsal process. But each time we have tried a new experience, I can confidently say I have thrown myself at each one with an open mind and each discovery about each exercise has shaped my progression I have made since September. Throughout my training, I will continue, to whittle down my process, but I already feel more confident and considered in my rehearsal techniques. I have noticed that my best acting work, stems from a well clued up, contextual grasp of the show and character in its entirety, and this is something I will keep exploring, to see how just how much further I can take this, to continue make the best acting choices I can, in all disciplines of performance. 

Bibliography

Berry, C. (1973) Voice and the actor. New York: Wiley publishing Inc 

Cloé. May 2025. The Stanislavski Method Explained: Key To Realistic Acting. Superprof. Available at https://www.superprof.co.uk/blog/what-is-the-stanislavski-technique/ Accessed 5^th January 2025 

Hagen U. (2009). Respect for Acting p 117 

Philip C. May 2025. What are Uta Hagen’s 9 Questions? Acting Magazine. Available at Acting Magazine What are Uta Hagen’s 9 Questions? – Acting Magazine Accessed 7th January 2025 

Stanislavski K. 1936. An Actor Prepares.  

Theatre C. Practitioners. Avaliable at https://sites.google.com/clayesmore.com/clayesmoretheatre/the-world/practitioners Accessed 5^th January 2025