Now that the three days of Bonnie and Clyde rehearsals are over, my focus can now go back to working on Saints and Sinners, which opens in less than a week. As I mentioned in last weeks action plan, I was unable to meet up with Sian to have a Shopping and F***ing rehearsal, however, this morning, we both met up with Erica where the aim of this rehearsal was to clean our piece and work out our character’s purpose.
One note that we got from Birgitta, who had never seen the show structure before, only understood what the piece was about half way through. Therefore, one thing that we needed work on was to get the mention about the drug dealing half way through. This has already been solved with Lynn, Emma and Jack, who changed some of the dialogue beforehand so that Lulu tells Ruby that she can’t deal in this club and Jimmy can’t see her. Because of this, we have to make our piece hushed and secretive, but one of the dangers is making it so hushed that the audience can’t hear us, therefore, we have to amplify our voices, which I have practiced in Lynn’s voice lessons in the past.
One of the habits I have when playing Ruby is that I tend to stand rigid, which although I wanted originally to make her awkward and clumsy, however, after watching the video below, it does not look right to the character, I will therefore practice making her movements more loose, as if she is in care free mode. There is now a monologue from Jimmy before we start her piece which calls Ruby a skank, which I need to amplify character wise to build this up. Therefore, movement wise, I can work on making her move with a swing. In terms of this, I can also look at making her appear rough with my hair and makeup, which I will work on next week.
After running the piece first, there were slight changes that were made, the first one was at the beginning, originally, I walk in looking anxious and because I try to keep the airhead personality from the start, to me I look apologetic. Although this personality really defines her character, I am going to walk in looking down, which makes more sense as she has just been beaten up. I can then drive up the personality when Lulu asks if there was a gun, being confused as that is nothing like what happened, with Lulu being really worried by that point and Ruby being confused, it can also add comedy. Another change which we have made is my character mouthing “300” out to the audience. This is because if I do it to Sian, then it looks like I am feeding her a line, which will not make it look professional, if I do it out to the audience, they shouldn’t get that feeling, the guilty look I will add when mouthing this will make them see that I am anxious about revealing this to Lulu.
The video below is not the final run we had during the rehearsal:
After we had this run through, we made one more change, which is on the line starting “and I give him the E and he takes it”, when I talk about him sweating, smiling and dancing, I will do a little dance myself. This will only be a small arm movement because she is copying what he was doing, I want to make it realistic to dancing in a night club as dance moves would be limited in terms of spacing because it would have been very crowded.
Black Comedy Research:
Although there had been talk of adding black comedy into the piece before, I had never researched into it. So in order to get a clearer understanding of the term, I researched the definition. I have found out that black comedy is taking a serious subject or situation and putting humour and making it lighter to audiences (Cash, no date). So from this, I can make Ruby joke about the situation even more, but not so much that the audience can’t understand what I am saying.
As well as this rehearsal, the new draft of the script was published by Lynn:
After reading through the script, the changes that have been made have really solved the issue we found in the stumble run regarding the link issues. The links that Jimmy has to introduce the acts now keep the mention of the theme of the show throughout, so that audiences are reminded throughout. In terms of my pieces, there is now a better intoduction to Saint Joan, with some context about her character and the time of the character.
In terms of the rehearsal, the changes that have been made for me makes the piece more believable, as Ruby would not have any happy emotion after being beaten up. She would have also taken some ecstasy pills and from what I have researched, the negative effects mean that she would have crashed to a low, which I can portray at the start and end of the scene. There were a couple of lines which we got messed up, therefore, I need to look at the script before the next run on Friday to ensure we do not freeze during the scene.
Reference List
Cash, J (no date) Black Comedy. Available at:Â http://www.theatrelinks.com/black-comedy/ (Accessed: 18 May)
Hannah King - Year 2 Acting 