What were the challenges of the production? Including rehearsals and final performance. (Personally).
- Learning lines so quickly
- Fully understanding my character
- Being in sync with the other actors during the Counts development scene
- First rehearsing the scene between the Count and Countess where they begin their relationship
- Projecting my voice but keeping the right emotion
- Trying not to trip over the long skirt!
- Timings for getting on and off stage
- Creating an instant relationship between the Countess and the Piano tuner
- Staging the death of the piano tuner
How were these challenges overcome?
- Learning lines was a personal challenge of mine. I tried many ways of trying to learn them including writing down lines over and over again, reading lines before bed, trying to relate different words to different actions. In the end, writing them down over and over again as well as rehearsing them over and over again seemed to work best. The week of the performance is the first time I ran through the whole production without needing to be prompted. This was a huge worry of mine!
- Steph our director held character development workshops for us where we could create our own back story to the character. This helped me create a relationship between myself and the character I was playing. The back story for the Countess was that she had come from quite a poor family in the village. She had always heard stories about the Count and his castle and was in awe ever since she was young. One day news got round that the Count was looking for a new wife. Innocently, she took a walk up to the castle gardens and started looking around. The Count then finds her snooping around, and this ends up as their first meet. As the Count likes younger girls, he takes an interest in the Countess, inviting her inside.
- The counts development scene took a while to get to grips with. Photos taken while we were rehearsing certainly helped us see the differences in how we were sat. Bearing that in mind along with direction from Steph, we all managed to do the same movements with the same arms in the same direction etc.
- The love scene between the Count and Countess was again a personal challenge because I had never done anything like this before. I had to get to know the actors as well as the characters they were playing to feel comfortable with this scene. The first time we rehearsed it felt awkward, but the more we rehearsed the more comfortable we felt around each other and the more direction we got to set the scene. It was also a challenge rehearsing without proper costume until the week of the performance. The Countess’ top half got changed the day before the performance, so thankfully the dress run went well.
- As we didn’t get chance to rehearse on the stage, we were unaware of how loud we needed to be. During our dress rehearsal we projected as much as we could, only to be told to be louder. During the final performance, we gave it all that we could. I found it difficult to know whether I was staying in character, but I kept full focus on the emotion I was supposed to be portraying in a certain scene and how close I was to the other actors (so I didn’t end up shouting in their ear!).
- Again, another costume challenge. The Countess’ skirt was extremely long, and during a couple of dress rehearsals I felt either myself or another actor stand on the bottom of it, nearly tripping me up. This was quickly solved by me staying in character and picking up the skirt when I walked anywhere.
- Because we weren’t able to use the stage and the lighting/sound until the day of performance, there was a huge stress on us to get on and off stage in time with the blackouts. Our dress rehearsal went well, so knowing this, we were just that little bit quicker on the actual performance. This is something that could have been worked on a lot more with dedicated time in the space to rehearse.
- The Countess and Piano Tuners relationship changes so dramatically in such a short period of time, I found it a challenge to portray how we felt about each other. Characterisation helped with the first scene between the two of them. Also the way we staged it, with the Countess being sat very close to the Piano Tuner. The audience had to realise that, (like Shakespeare) the characters in A Gothic Tale fell in love very quickly. There wasn’t enough time in the production for love to be gradual. Myself and Gary had to feel comfortable with each other to be acting so closely so we worked on our relationship before working on the characters relationships. Because we are friends away from university, we sometimes found it difficult to stay in character and not laugh!
- The death of the Piano Tuner was something which took a while to stage as we had to make sure the audience could see and understand what was happening. The last scene was very dramatic so we didn’t want the death to look tacky and under rehearsed. In fact, the last scene is one of the scenes that was rehearsed the most. The Countess had to stab the Piano Tuner a certain way and stand in a certain position to help him “fall” to the ground without hurting himself. The fall was rehearsed over and over again to make sure we understood where we needed to be and when. Our facial expressions were also something that we worked on. I had to put myself into the Countess’ shoes – I have just killed the man I love by accident. Thinking so melodramatically was difficult!
There were of course, other challenges throughout the process of putting the production together. These were the main challenges for me throughout the rehearsal process however, and I believe that we dealt with each of them in the best possible way. We used team work when overcoming challenges and this was one of the things that brought us closer together as a group.
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Francesca
