rehearsals 5-8 november

At this point we had all been given our characters for three sisters so we did a read through in role and then decided just to get it up on its feet and run with it. This is because we can start getting a feel around staging and the set. There is only so much progress you can make whilst sitting down and reading a script, best just to start moving with it and giving it some life.

At first I found it difficult and awkward to become the character of Olga not just because her characterist are different to anything I have done before, but I fact the whole play is a very new style and layout for me. The scene I am acting in is the opening scene and it is just setting up the story for the rest of the play and so not much is going on in terms of drama and strong emotions, it is all pretty relaxed and in a sense dull because of this. Therefore Olga doesn’t get up to much expect some light hearted conversations with her sisters and guests. It is all very naturalistic which is different to what I am used to but after running through it a few times with my group I started to vibe off of other characters and it helped me relax and slip into the character of Olga. Over time this should get better and hopefully by the end of this week I have Olga figured out and able to become her right from the beginning. To help me understand Olga more I am going to do extra research into her and expand my knowledge on her character profile.

In rehearsals we decided to play around with the idea of Masha being a stubborn, immature sister and it worked really well. At the beginning of the first scene she does not speak for quite some time so she will need to interact with her actions and facial expressions to get across her feelings about what is being said. She did things such as pull faces when her sisters tease her and flip through her book she is reading really noisily. These kind of actions just make it clearer to the audience that they are sisters and seems more truthful to her character.

One thing that me and my group need to focus on next week is making sure we are picking up our cues and the lines are flowing fluently. Right now we have little gaps and pauses here and there were people are unsure wether it is their line and so are not coming in quick enough for it to look like a natural conversation. Hopefully over the weekend people are also really focusing on learning the lines so we can start the week off without scripts. This is a target we have set each other for before next rehearsal. I think it is a really good thing to be off script at this point because you free up your hands and are not always looking down at a piece of paper, meaning you are instead looking at other characters and actually being fully immersed into the scene and what you are saying