Evaluation of Performance

Evaluation of performance:

Basics

I had learnt all of my lines but on the day of the final performance I feel as though I could have learnt them off by heart which would mean that I would have felt 100percent confident on them. I delivered my lines correctly and only muddled up one of my scenes but as a collective, we rescued it and the audience were none the wiser. My weakness was that I wasn’t feeling fully confident with my lines but if I was, the muddle up of lines wouldn’t have occurred. I only came across one issue with entrances when I had to take a table off stage; which I hadn’t planned to do. But the issue was solved, and the scene continued to flow as normal. The weakness in this was that as a cast, we needed to have a full run of the show to ensure small issues like this were solved in advance and not on the night.

Stylistically

The style of the piece was contemporary and I know that I achieved a naturalistic performance from a few comments I received previous to the final performances; I ‘act very believable’. This is a great acting skill to have but it highlights that I have a weakness spot for becoming a ‘larger-than-life’ character; so this is something that I will need to focus on and try to include in the next few college performances. “Get rid of your Issie-isms” was a comment Karen made to me after the performance because I had included a lot of myself into the character of Rachel. In general, I portrayed Rachel as a very naturalistic character from her clothes to her movements, and I was unaware of making her into a very naturalistic character which proves to me that beyond this is out of my comfort zone; and being naturalistic is my safety net. Physically Rachel was very naturalistic, as I based her around normal, day-to-day people with poses such as crossed arms and hands in pocket, and even the tapping of the foot. And again, in ensemble pieces I illustrated Rachel just as someone most people have come across in their lives.  Now that the ‘curtains have been opened’ I can see how naturalistic she is, I feel frustrated because I could've made her a very weird and abstract character to mix up the play from all the other natural characters. From this I can identify that my weakness is to come out of myself and try new things with characters. To be brave and willing to fail at ideas, only to ladder them up.

Actors skill

My character, Rachel is a loud, fiery independent woman who doesn’t like to be told what to do and she always believes that she can make a difference in the world, alone. My personality is almost the opposite of this which meant that this character was a challenge for me. The characteristics of Rachel were to be loud, bold and confident. I based Rachel on Stacey out of EastEnders specifically for Act 1 Scene 8. This is a scene which Rachel is heightened with anger and hatred and is screaming down the phone to the Police station on the other end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtCo6c_O5Lk This is a video of Stacey shouting and getting angry; although we are not aware of the context in which she gets angry I could still use the level of her voice and also the harshness of each word she pronounces for Rachel. I didn’t change my voice to fit the part of Rachel, which looking back on the character in general would’ve made her much more different from the other characters, which is exactly what I wanted to do with Rachel.

Another characteristic of Rachel is her walk. I made her walk with long strides of my legs to show that she is always trying to get somewhere important and no one will get in her way.

Ensemble

I think it’s fantastic that our entire class has got to know each other so quickly and we are so friendly to everyone! The teamwork throughout the play was exceptional; in the scene I skipped the lines the other actors saved it and continued from where I had left it.

The focus of every single actor was brilliant. As protestors (Brandon, myself, Nyakeh, Jake, Donna, Milo and Soph) we had a few scenes in which we had to sit on stage. And by peripheral vision I could see that each actor was sat how their characters would sit, doing subtle things that their character would do. Such as Milo slowly smoking a cigarette and Soph & Nyakeh star gazing and pointing at the ceiling. This focus meant the audience could continue watching what was happening center stage, and not be too distracted by us. The focus back stage was also very good; no one felt the need to speak to each other as we were all focussing on the performance and scenes that were still to come.

To conclude I felt that all three of our final performances were extremely successful, and best of all I was really proud of myself for the general performance of Rachel. My sister whom came and watched the performance said

"I really enjoyed watching the performance as it was all very visually interesting with the layout and staging. I found the ending scene very moving with the speech from the war general and the Big Ben chimes. I thought that Rachel (Issie) was a very individual, head-strong character that really helped the play to be more verbally dynamic. Her characterisation of Rachel really enabled her to play around and be free with the character to make her more unique.”

And to finish, I would like to say a massive well done to all the cast and thank you to Karen who directed us and supported us all through our first show together.