After devising all the stories and working on the transitions into each piece, I felt that the show as a whole needed more for it to click for the audience, and for everyone to understand the premise behind the show and what message we want them to leave with. When we did a full run of the piece it felt like there was something missing for me, I’ve really struggled to grasp the more complex understanding behind the play and the penny hasn’t fully dropped for me yet, and I feel like we’ve lost the style behind our production a little bit as well. However, I think the piece as a whole is really strong and I’m very proud of all the characters I’ve developed and I know this will showcase how versatile I am and the different styles and ideas I can bring to a company.
After showing it to Carleigh, she ran us through some ideas that would firstly bring honesty back to the piece, but also adding to the idea that every girl in the show is going for the casting and no matter what she does, she will never get the role as long as the guys are involved. When we were first pitched the idea of the show being about a casting I really liked it and I was disappointed that we lost this style in some of the stories and it’s important that we should keep this a running theme throughout the show, rather than having a few pockets here and there. As for the honesty, there are several moments in the show where we need to go back and strip it down, especially Faith In Ourselves. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at heightening the characters inside of the story but I’ve been struggling to tap into Anya’s emotion in this piece and I’ve been researching stories of refugees and mothers in this situation, but this method hasn’t helped me during this process and now I’ve got the opportunity to strip it back and start bringing these moments from a place of sensitivity where I can focus on doing Anya justice and keeping the naturalism instead of heightening the character so much that it becomes unbelievable. I really enjoyed reworking the scene with the new ideas and I felt that this was the strongest I had performed this story which put me in a better place with this character.
Another idea that we’ve developed is having an introduction at the beginning of the piece to break the boundary between us and the audience and share a moment with honesty with them and show everyone who I am before I take myself into the mindset of all these stories and characters. Stating something as simple as my name and the fact that I’m a woman is so important and we need to set ourselves up for the final moment at the start of the story. Prior to this, we didn’t bring the idea of the men always getting the casting until we got to the penultimate story, leading to potential confusion in the audience of what the message was, so it's important that this is a running theme throughout the piece so it will be clearer for the audience to understand. An idea that I wasn’t a fan of until we got into the run was introducing all of the women as they go onto play Anne but when we started to get these moments on their feet, I really enjoyed the charm and wit everyone was bringing to these. I really enjoyed trying out my moment for Anya, and I initially messed up the name of the character, however it was very funny, the rest of the company thought I was putting on a skit and I was told to keep it in and bring as much naturalism to that moment to make it as funny as I could, this whole introduction is about bringing yourself which I found quite challenging in the opening introduction, but since the mess up that I brought to my individual one I found it much easier to bring myself to these moments and show what makes me who I am, and show how proud I am to be who I am. There were so many witty moments in everyone's introductions which I loved, especially Mia coming in for the third time, giving up and just pointing to her headshot, and I think this will be perfect for the comedic style of the show and it sets every scene up nicely to continue with the whole casting idea which has really grown on me.
However, something I’m really struggling with is the new style of character that I need to bring to Untitled. I worked hard to develop a flamboyant character who's excited and passionate about art and even though she partly understands what Annes message is in this piece she's put together, she misunderstands some of the meanings behind it and reiterates the idea that nobody understands Anne. I also really liked the relationship between mine and Grace’s characters and the argument at the end was really powerful and I was enjoying developing it and helping to build the tension even further. However, to bring the story back down to earth I need to bring more honesty to the character and keep the character at the level she is but be more serious about what she's discussing. I found it really challenging to add this new flavour to my character as I worked hard to cement this passionate character and get my mouth round the words whilst keeping the character heightened, and I struggled to try this out when we ran the scene, but I eventually found a good balance between this flamboyant character that I wanted to keep but make this passion more serious. I later went for a journalist style for this character, like someone who’s giving a breaking news story which clicked for me and I started playing with it even further. It was disappointing that I had to change this so late into the process after all the work I’d been doing to add all the finer details, but this is one of the many moments that are delicate and need to be handled with a balance of care and misunderstanding, and I’m glad we’ve found somewhere where we can keep both at a good level.
After running the piece again with these adjustments and adding important moments into it, for me the penny has dropped and all these stories are starting to tie together with a continuing theme which was massively missing from our previous run. It made me feel really emotional knowing that after this whole process and how much I’ve struggled with understand the piece, it’s finally hit me what this show is about and even though it took me a lot longer to process and understand the meaning behind ‘Attempts on her Life’, I’m so proud and happy that this puzzle is now complete for me!
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