Wednesday 3rd May - East then Lunch

In the lesson time, we were again working on the section from East from last week. At the beginning of the lesson, I was having doubts about whether our performance would be suitable for Berkoff, and whether it was any good at all. You never know until you perform it... so after the first twenty minutes Chipp made us do a sneak peak of the first twenty seconds to see if we were on track. Naturally I was nervous, of being revealed as awful at Berkoff and any form of self-directing! But it was fine - turned out we were on the right track after all and people seemed to enjoy the performance so thumbs up from me.

Therefore, with this report, we decided to carry on in the same nature as we had done previously, and because we're just such damn good workers and real goody-two-shoes, we added a little extra bit on to the end. One bit of advice we tried to act on from our twenty second preview review, was to add more sound effects. We added a couple, but I don't feel like it was to the right extent or effect, watching another group's later I realised they were pauses in the dialogue whereas we tried to incorporate it into the dialogue making it a bit rushed and ineffective.

After rehearsing for an hour or so, I can certifiably tell you that Berkoff is extraordinarily exhausting. At the end of our piece, I end up lying on the ground and found that the space of time between me finishing and getting up increased with each rehearsal - apparently I am not in great physical shape at the moment.

One of the major issues for me personally was coordinating the lines coming out of my mouth with the movements, remembering the lines whilst moving, remembering the moves, then the facial expression and characterisation on top of that, as well as the Cockney accent (still atrocious), so basically, I had a problem with everything.

However, with copious (exhausting) rehearsal the piece got pretty smooth and had a very good pace to it. It was energetic with a lot of movement, and I think it went down pretty well with the audience. I certainly felt pretty good after performing it, though it wasn't perfect, I think it began to capture the idea of Berkoff and had a lot of good energy.

In the N2C time we began looking at another of Berkoff's plays: Lunch. This involves and man and a woman and their sub-consciences in which the couple are constrained by societal etiquette / awkwardness whilst the sub-consciences have free reign expressing their thoughts, getting pretty weird, sexual and a bit uncomfortable (to perform at least) at times. I took the part of the males sub-conscience despite being forced to play the female one in the read-through because I "always play the guy" or something. It was pretty fun getting into this part, and trying to get rid of all reservations and just go for it. I think I was maybe a little too loud, forgetting to be subtle at times, but the voice kind of worked for the character. 

We found it hard to come up with anything, partly because it was difficult splitting the lines between real and conscience and trying to make it work in performance with the different interactions e.g. could the two sub-consciences interact, should they also interact with opposite gender's real person, should the two real persons act Berkoffian or should they have more realism. In the end, we decided the two sub-consciences should interact, though not with the opposite gender's real person and the real one should have more realism though the sub-conscience manipulates their bodies at times. It was also difficult because people were feeling a bit exhausted, and therefore not very creative or on the ball. By the end of the lesson, we weren't feeling any more confident with the scene then we did ten minutes in to the rehearsal process, all we were really confident with was the entrance. We didn't leave it positively, and were a bit nervous about having to perform it the following week.