Evaluation on Our Country's Good

The researched I carried out on the play helped to understand the play and my character even more as I’ve never seen this play before and I didn’t know what my character was like so I researched the play and my character. I watched YouTube videos of people performing my scene and my character to get the idea of who my character is and what she is like. I used my own interpretation of my character including Stanislavski’s techniques which I found very useful when researching because I found that it helped me develop my character more. For example I used the technique of Emotional memory where I thought of a moment in my life where I was in Mary’s position and so I adapted to it to make my emotions realistic. Each of the characters in the scene had an objective, a purpose and mine was to help Dabby Bryant and Liz Morden with their lines. The subtext and motivation helped me to make my character more realistic because I could look into specific words and I could find the meaning behind it such as when I say ‘I’ll teach you the lines’ to Liz Morden shows how determined my character is to help her learn her lines.  The motivation of the text makes you think about the emotions you need to stimulate your actions. Overall, the play is based on convicts who supposed that they could take a turn in their life to do something good so they decide to put on a production as they believe starring in a play will help them achieve their goal. This links with Stanislavski’s teachings of believing that when playing a bad character you should find the good in them and vice versa.

I fell as if I’ve developed the skill of physicality in my play for example, throughout rehearsals when Dabby says to Liz ‘..you can’t read’, Liz (played by Stephanie) would quickly attacked Dabby (played by Dulce) by pulling her hair and I needed to run in to break them apart. I needed great timing of when to come in and speed and I believe I’ve achieved that. In addition, I focused on my vocals and tried to articulate the words to make it clear to the audience what I am saying. Even though Mary is quite a shy character, I still used a clear loud voice however with my body language and the emotions on my face I portrayed a shy character.

The collaborative piece with the musical theatre students went fantastically considering we didn’t have much time to prepare it. This brought us together as a performing arts industry. At first, I didn’t think that our Greek Theatre plays would go together with the musical theatre’s movement piece but once we got it all together it managed to work really well.  I believe for me working with the dancers gave me a good experience and idea to use in the future. However, something that could’ve gone well and that we needed more rehearsal time on was the timing of the piece and where the positions for people were. It seemed as if some of the parts were slow and people were confused as to where they should stand.

The ‘Our Country’s Good’ performance went very well as we expected however a couple of pauses and mistaken lines but the audience didn’t even seem to notice. As a group, we worked very hard trying to interpret different ways of performing our play such as doing the play in one emotion; anger. I feel that the relationship between the characters in my group was very strong, it was clear that Dabby seemed to have more power over me and when Liz enters, Dabby’s power over Liz is challenged as they are both stronger characters than Mary so they both try to overpower each other. Another thing I felt was strong was, our facial expressions were strong when reacting to some of the things one of us were saying for example, when Stephanie tells me to read the script instead of her I question her and she used put on an annoyed and irritated facial expression because I was asking too many questions and didn’t just do what she said. This is also an example of the theme of power in the play. We managed to interact with the audience as they seemed to love Stephanie’s character as we got lots of laughter when Stephanie kissed her teeth at Dabby and when I called Dabby a whore the audience went ‘ooooh’. Some things that could’ve gone well was Jireh’s entrance as Ketch, we didn’t rehearse him coming in from behind us and putting his arms around Stephanie and I but we had to go along with it. It seemed a bit awkward but we managed to pull it off. In rehearsals he was supposed to come from downstage right and have his back to the audience so the audience can see Dulce, Stephanie and I clearly forming a type of girl power against Ketch even though we don’t really like each other. Overall, the use of voice was very clear from every person in the group, and the interaction with each other worked very well for example the cat fight. We all stayed in role even when there were slight pauses, we managed to skip to the other line and carry on for example, when Stephanie forgot to say one of her lines I skipped to the next. The use of space and levels of characters worked very well for example, Dulce started off sitting on the floor daydreaming and later on standing up.

The production elements of sound and lighting were successful. Hopefully in the future when we do another performance, we are able to use a wide range of lighting such as red or blue. It seemed quite dull and basic. I think what we need to develop is our movement because I noticed some people couldn’t really stand still and danced about which showed they were nervous. Also, our vocals needed working on as a few of us didn’t really project and articulate their words correctly so it made it hard to the audience to understand what they are saying. To improve this we would need more vocal warm ups and tongue twisters. If we were to take this production on tour I think having costume and more props would introduce the setting of the scene and to show who these characters are. For example, to show a character that is poor, they would have torn clothing and look dirty whereas for a rich character their clothing would be the opposite. Finally, the idea of us wearing all black didn’t reveal which character we are playing because we all looked the same so it was harder for the audience to guess who our character is.

Throughout this term, I think that I’ve improved a lot. At first, it was mostly quick skits to play together so we can get to know each other and we’ve all become a great team in working together and supporting each other. I believe I’ve worked better on my vocals especially my articulation due to the tongue twisters we say over and over again as a class for a warm up. Also, I’ve now realised how important it is to have an objective for your character in a play because without one you wouldn’t know what your character wants to achieve. At the start of the term, I set a few targets/goals for myself and one of them was to be more confident when talking to people because when I’m acting on stage I have all the confidence in the world because I am not myself but when I am myself I tend to be quite shy. However, I do get a bit nervous but I’ve managed to reduce that to not being so nervous and just relax because it causes me to forget my lines. My goals for next term are working with other people who I don’t usually socialise with and deliver many successful performances.


Here's the video to our performance: