Five Kinds of Silence Research Portfolio

- Started off the rehearsal on Thursday with the number game (counting to 20 as a group but each person says an individual number and no two people can talk at the same time) We also did a vocal warm up drawn from Patsy Rodenburg (research which specific exercise was used) 

- We then all laid on the floor and did the relaxation Stanislavski technique which we also did at the beginning. This involved lying on the floor while Julie lead us into a guided relaxation and we were asked to think about our character, what our character would be thinking and feeling etc. 

- After this, we did some hotseating to help develop characterisation. The questions that were asked and the answers will be made a note of and sent to us over email (edit this post later)

- Subsequently, we split off into pairs and we did an exercise that involved another person reading a monologue or a portion of text than the person who was playing that character. I went with George Binns who plays Billy in the play, and we began by exploring his monologue from the beginning of the play. After we realised that not much work was needed on this, we looked at his monologue about Billy’s childhood experience of touring the army barracks in his home town. He didn’t know exactly how to say it, and wasn’t quite comfortable with how to perform it. I performed it to him in a happy, almost psychotic way. The monologue describes how much he loves the order of the army barracks and really outlines his OCD. My interpretation of that monologue was that Billy feels like he is in heaven. It gives him comfort to see so much order. Because of this I suggested that George channels his inner OCD. This helped him, and he was more comfortable with performing the monologue afterwards. 

- Throughout the rest of the rehearsal we did run throughs with support from the creative team. A few ideas were spit balled about Mary and the girls constantly tidying and making everything as Billy would like it throughout the play to outline his OCD and the effect that he has had on them. 

- We began with Lecoq’s 7 levels of tension to explore which level our characters would be at throughout the play. The seven levels of tension are as follows:

Looked at the Meisner approach when looking at pieces of the script. This involved getting a piece of text from the script and taking all punctuation out, and then putting it in where we thought it would go. I didn’t find this exercise particularly helpful as the technique is mainly used with monologues, and my character doesn’t have any.

Throughout this rehearsal we continued to go through the play and began blocking scenes. This included putting some music to the beginning movement sequence and working through artistic ideas with that. The way that some of the abuse was shown towards Mary, Janet and Susan by Billy was quite similar to the way I have seen Frantic Assembly handle stage combat. When we get around to putting other movement sequences into the piece, it might be worth drawing from Frantic Assembly for inspiration. 

For our final project in third year, we are putting on a student directed play called Five Kinds of Silence. This is about a horrifically abusive Father Billy who is shot by his wife and two daughters at the beginning of the play, and the piece explores the effect of psychological, physical and sexual abuse through a series of monologues, and interviews with the police, a lawyer and a psychiatrist. We will be rehearsing every Thursday and Friday and I will be keeping a weekly journal on Tumblr logging progress, research etc. 

On the Thursday, we explored the script and to gain a better understanding of the play and our characters, the first thing we did was to read through the script in character and analysed areas of the text. After this, we did a characterisation technique called ‘Role on the Wall’ that a guest lecturer introduced us to in our professional practice module. This involved drawing the outline of a person on a piece of paper and writing what we already knew about our character from the script inside the lines, and then as we went along with the process the idea was that we would write what we learnt about our characters would be written outside the lines. 

As my character is “police officer/detective” there wasn’t much for me to go from in the script, so therefore it will be important for me to be creative with who my character is, what drives them, what their thoughts and feelings are etc. As part of my research for this role, I have chosen to look at some sexual abuse cases, some documentaries on abuse and interviews with police officers who have dealt with this kind of case to analyse how they deal with it, the effect that it has on them mentally and emotionally, and how I can incorporate this into my characterisation.