When you start working on a performance, you can never quite know how it is going to turn out when you actually perform your piece for the first time to an audience. You get a song from the 80's presented in front of you and you end up putting jhhon a show about an abusive man born in the nineteenth century. This all happened trough hours of planning and throwing ideas back and forward. What ever happened, I have to say that I am pleased with what we came up with, but now that the work has been done and the rush of performing is fading, it is time to look back on our piece and see, what worked and what didn't? And more importantly, how did we end up with these decisions?
Our show told the story of the Master of Hillway Manor. We start of with three servants welcoming the audience to the show and the manor, only to be interrupted by the dreaded Master. After this we dive into the life of the Master, first showing his abusive present self, but then quickly giving more insight about his childhood, showing his parents arguing with violent outcomes, and then going into the Masters young adulthood with him being confronted by his Fiancée about him changing into a man like his abusive father. Then we go back to present, and in the end we leave the audience to think, was it his fault to become like this, or was it the world and the Masters surroundings that moulded him?
Obviously there was quite a lot of story going on in a short amount of time, but I feel we as a group were able to portray the emotions and characters an a clear way, being able to not confuse the audience. The story worked because of these clear characters. One of our biggest strengths was definitely the fact that we were all juggling more than one character and change from character to another with simply changing how we held ourselves. Going through the scenes and practising these changes over and over again really helped with the transitions, but I feel that one of the exercises done in class especially gave us assistance with this. In the exercise you start waling in neutral and, like putting on clothes, piece by piece you start adding more character in your way of holding yourself and how you move. With me, playing the characters of a new Ditsy Servant and the dominative Father, I was able to differentiate my characters from each other by doing this exercise, and so know what each character of mine would do with their bodies.
Originally, our piece was going to include a lot more about the characters surrounding the Master, like the stories of the three maids. So, we as group, had a lot of discussions about our characters, creating them back stories and detailed personalities, that the audience didn't end up seeing. This still helped us to relate to each character and really bring them alive on stage. Even though we didn't get to include the back stories of other characters than the Master, this process really gave us the chance to develop strong emotions amongst the story, which was also a part our group got some good feedback about. There was a variation of emotions, main theme being some kind of desperation, anger and denial. We were able to balance out these strong aggressive emotions with some moments of silence during the show. Especially with the ending with the Master been left alone on stage, lights slowly fading to darkness.
But as in any performance, everything did not go perfectly and there were things that might not have worked. Many of the things that did not work in our scene were to do with our bad time management. We started working on our scene with talking a lot and writing things down. We had so many ideas about what we wanted the show to be about, feminism, discrimination, conformity, equality, and the list goes on. It took us too long to actually realize that perhaps we should pick one idea and stick with it. This enabled us to come up with clear theme in the end, but since it took us so log to get to it, we didn't have the time to start developing any of the other characters around the Master enough to show more than one side of them. Rather they stayed as charicatures like the Ditsy Maid, Mother,Father, Obedient Servant and the Fiancee. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing, since it does bring more attention to the main character, but I personally think we could have developed the story even further by showing the Masters relationship with his mother, for example. There could have been so much more in the story even bringing up a new, more loving side of the Master. We would have even had the room to show more, but we ran out of time to start creating new scenes within the piece. We would have rather put on a simple yet clear show with a strong message, than tried to make it more complex, with losing the clarity and maybe even drifting away from what we wanted to say with our performance.
Another thing that didn't work out troughfully with our piece was the blocking, and mainly the positioning of the characters troughout the performance. A lot of our scenes consisted us being in a line or otherwise just not using the stage to its full potential. We found ourselves drifting downstage in way too many parts, when there could have been more creative ways to use the space. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but this probably was also because of the fact that we did not use our time efficiently enough during our rehearsals. When we should have been up on our feet trying out different ideas and doing more improvising with the scene, what we did was focusing on the characters and their emotions.
If I could go back and change something about the show, I would like to add more dialogue between the characters. It would had been interesting to see more of how the Master actually becomes the man he is, showing his struggle trying not to become his father. It would have also been nice to see more of his relationships with the other characters. Re-thinking the blocking, having more fun with it and giving some interesting layers to the story, I would have on the top of my list as well. Still, I feel good about the show over all, since I can see all the hard work we put into it, despite some things that might not have worked.
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