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Actor and Text Process Portfolio
Introduction
Throughout my first term, I have been working through a variety of different styles of contemporary and classical scripts in my Actor and Text lessons with my tutor, and actor, Claire Eden. She has helped me discover different techniques for building my craft as an actor, and in this portfolio, I will discuss and assess what has worked for me for specific styles of script, and potentially what hasn’t worked as well, but has ultimately taught me valuable lessons about my process as an actress, and what I can do to give the most effective performance possible with a process that I’m comfortable with and can complete independently and efficiently.
Table Reading – Punk Rock script
The first class we had, we looked into and analysed the characters in the play ‘Punk Rock’ (2009, Simon Stephens), which focuses on seven sixth-form students who are trying to get through A Levels, whilst also struggling with darker issues such as bullying, violence, questioning sexuality, and masked psychological distress. The first task we completed with this script, was pairing up and choosing a section of script to read with two characters, without looking over it first, a cold read. We then did the same, but with a larger group of 6-7 people and a larger scene so everybody would have a character to read, this being the ‘table read’. I would definitely say that out of all the techniques we’ve experimented with throughout classes; table reads have been my favourite. My reasoning for this is because it gives everybody the chance to dive straight into a full read with a cast of other actors, and there are no preconceptions you can have about the character you’re reading, or any other characters in the play, which gave me so much room to explore how I perceived the character as I read. This got easier the further into the scene we read, because I could use the lines I’d read so far to shape my performance of future lines I would read, so I could argue a downside to table reads is the initial few lines you read as your character could feel uncertain, however, an easy way to avoid this is just to commit to any impulse you have as an actor, and if you discover the character is different to this, you can transition to what you need to in a way that is natural. What I feel is so helpful to me with table reads for my process as an actor is that you can take ideas and inspirations from your initial read and the direction you take the character, because even if it isn’t completely accurate, I find it so interesting to see what people’s first impressions are, and what that says about the character and how they speak, because sometimes they’re accurate, and sometimes not. But even when they are, you can still miss things, such as why they’re behaving that way and saying what they’re saying, you miss the subtext of the script, and for me, after I’ve done a table read, I immediately want to think about the subtext so I can improve my performance. For example, I was playing the role of Cissy in the group table read, and as soon as she started trying Nicholas’ jacket on, I immediately got the sense that she was a troublemaker with the boys, since the way she was talking was very flirty, and I’d been made aware that Cissy and Bennett were dating by a classmate who’d read the play before. I also noticed that she felt the need to be speaking and involved in the conversation constantly, which naturally made me change my acting to make her more unlikable as a character, to match her behaviour. However, when we finished the table reads, our teacher asked us to write down thoughts about our characters, which really made me think about why Cissy behaves the way she did in that scene, without having read the rest of the play, and I decided to do a mind map of words I would use to describe her character, but also what might lie beneath that, and this helped me to understand what drives her behaviour, and it gave much more depth to her. Overall, I’ve discovered that the process of table reads and the analysis of my character afterwards is extremely helpful for me as an actor, and it’s a great place for me to start when approaching a new script.
Mind map of words I used to associate with Cissy’s character, along with what I felt could be underneath her persona. I used both my creative impulses and implications of the script.
Walking the Text – Shakespeare
In our fourth week of lessons, we analysed some William Shakespeare scripts from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1597), a tale of forbidden love, the couple coming from two feuding families, and how far they go for love, which ultimately leads them both to despair with their double suicide. We talked about how punctuation, especially in Shakespeare texts is disregarded and ignored, leading to scripts losing their meaning from how they were intended to be. To combat this, we were introduced to a technique called ‘Walking the Text’ where you read your script while walking around the room, and punctuation dictates your actions. For example, a full stop means you stop and then continue, an exclamation mark means you stop and jump, a question mark means you spin in a circle, and so on. The value of this exercise is to put physical actions alongside punctuation, forcing you to notice it, which shows you its value, as well as question why it’s been put there and how that could affect your acting choices. Personally, I feel the exercise itself was unhelpful, however, the nature of what it’s asking you to reflect on is incredibly useful for me as a performer. The specific walking the text exercise for Shakespeare scripts, to me, made me completely focus on only performing the movements at the correct times to correlate with the punctuation, and I would lose any sense of performance I was giving beforehand, meaning I wasted time afterwards trying to merge together the exercise and how It would influence my performance. For me, I feel that I have learnt a valuable lesson from this class, as it’s reminded me to value the punctuation that is used in Shakespeare texts, and to physically go through a script and highlight the punctuation I see so that I have a visual on where I can take different choices and improve my performance, since I believe that even if an audience member doesn’t understand the language in classical texts, they can still understand what’s happening and the characters emotions if its performed effectively, and a big part of that is respecting the punctuation. I’m saying this as someone who for a long time, didn’t appreciate Shakespeare, but after watching a production of ‘Julius Caesar'(1599, William Shakespeare) performed my theatre group in 2022, was surprised at how much I was able to follow the story and connect with the characters. After this, I took the opportunity to audition for their production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream'(1600, William Shakespeare) and play the role of Titania in 2023. After we had this lesson on walking the text, I thought about that experience, and wondered how I could have used what I took from the lesson and improved my performance, so in my own time, I printed off a new script and highlighted the punctuation, then saw if I could make any better acting choices to intrigue an audience if I were to perform it again. This is attached below, and I feel like it is useful to show how I’ve linked the technique I learnt and how I shaped it into a specific process element for me, and then applied it to a past performance and try to use it to improve.
The script for one of my scenes as Titania in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by William Shakespeare, with annotations and highlighted punctuation as I mentioned. The blue highlights are punctuation, and the green highlights on the annotations are the punctuation they are, or key words I take from the punctuation to get my brain thinking of acting choices I can use, (e.g. ‘instruction’), and then after that are my thoughts on where I can take the acting and the character.
World Building – Me and My Girl
In week five, we moved onto musical texts and thought about their similarities and differences to plays. The musical we looked at was ‘Me and My Girl'(1937, Noel Gay), which is a comedy about a working class, cockney man named Bill, who finds out that he is actually the heir to an extremely wealthy and aristocratic family, and has to learn how to adjust to his true status in society and how to behave so he can inherit his wealth. One of the main issues for Bill in the show, is that his new family don’t approve of his current girlfriend Sally, who is a working-class cockney girl from Lambeth. They are deeply in love, but after Sally learns who Bill truly is, she understands she cannot be with him, as the two are just not meant to be in the eyes of Bill’s family, and society in general, she ends up temporarily leaving Bill and returning home, but comes back after she transforms herself with help from a speech coach, and her and Bill reunite as a couple, building a bridge between them and Bill’s family. We were given a script where Sally is breaking it off with Bill at the bar, and put into groups of 4. We were told to do what was called World building through the form of research. We were given some different categories and told to look into what they were like back in the time period of the musical. These categories included politics, fashion, music and money. Our group decided that the first thing to do before even looking at our script was to take a category each and research it in the time the musical was set (late1930s) and then come together and share what we found. I feel like this was a very effective way to save time, and getting the same amount of detail, so if I work in groups in the future, I’d be quite likely to suggest this method for a more efficient process. I had fashion, and so I took some notes after researching what it was like back in the 1930s for a better understanding of how our characters would dress. After coming together and sharing, we all had a much better idea of the World that these people were living in, and it was extremely helpful to me as an actor, and I felt it would be very useful to put into my process to help me make choices based off the circumstances of the World, as well as be more specific about the given circumstances for my character, and how the state of the world would affect them, and how it would affect them emotionally as a person and impact their decisions and behaviour. I’ve learnt that World building is extremely important, and that applying it in my process will be beneficial to me to make emotional choices on behalf of my character, for example, I was playing the role of Bill in this scene, and after learning from my classmate from her research on money, that there was extreme and widespread poverty in Britain, and having wealth was extremely valuable, I took that information and applied it to my character. My thought process that stemmed from the information I received from World building was that Bill would most likely feel extremely lucky that he’s truly an heir to massive wealth, and part of him deep down wouldn’t want to jeopardise that, but he also knows that he isn’t willing to abandon Sally in the conditions of poverty alone, I thought about it that we would try so hard to get her to stay with him so that they can both live comfortably, but ultimately, he would rather go back to his old life to stay with her, which is shown in the script when he tells Sally that if she returns to Lambeth he’ll only follow her. This method helps me get into the headspace of my character very well, allowing me to make appropriate choices to give the best and most realistic performance possible.
My research on fashion and my character information and his given circumstances.
Word count: 2085 (excluding bibliography and quotes)
Bibliography
Dickson-Purdy, J. (2009). Official London Theatre [online] Available at: https://officiallondontheatre.com/london-musicals/.
Gay, N. (1937). Me and My Girl. London, Cinephonic Music Co., Ltd.
Karim-Cooper, F. (year unknown). A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Entire Play. [online] Available at: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/3/1/.
Shakespeare, W. (1600). A Midsummer Night’s Dream. London, Thomas Fisher
Shakespeare, W. (1599).Julius Caesar. First Folio, Edward Blount and William Jaggard.
Shakespeare, W. (1597). Romeo and Juliet. London, John Danter.
Stephens, S. (2009). Punk Rock. London, Bloomsbury Publishing
Wikipedia. (2020). Me and My Girl. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_My_Girl.
