Evaluation of The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Shakespeare in Da House

Since my partner and I, and a few other groups didn’t get the chance to perform in someone’s house, I will be evaluating the performance I did on 11^th March.

Dedan and I performed the Shakespeare play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. I played the character of Speed and he played the character Valentine. Speed is Valentine’s servant and Valentine is deeply in love with Sylvia and Speed teases Valentine about it. We both really enjoyed playing these characters and exploring different ways in portraying our character. For example, I tried making the inside joke Speed says clearer to the audience that he’s taking the mickey out of Valentine. Whereas, Dedan explored the emotion of love by changing the tone of his voice at points in the scene to show he has not a care in the world for anyone else but Sylvia.

For costumes, Dedan wore a blue and white suit to show he has higher status and I wore a black blazer-jacket, a white top and black trousers to clearly show that I’m the servant. In our scene, Sylvia loses a glove and Speed finds it to give to Valentine thinking he lost it. The prop that we used was a glove and a love letter that Valentine wrote for Sylvia to read.

Rob directed our positions on stage so there were five groups on stage at once. The only lighting we use throughout the whole performance was a spotlight which was shown towards the front of the audience so you weren’t able to see the other groups on stage covered by darkness. As Dedan and I were first to perform, after we had finished we rotated anti-clockwise until everyone got the chance to perform and we took a bow and the second half of the class came on.

Since we had already performed to the same audience a couple of times we had gotten use to their immaturity and just focused on ourselves. I think Dedan and I performed really well and we told our relation between each other really clearly so there were no confusions. We both knew our lines fully although I missed a line I don’t think we noticed or anyone noticed because they were so into the performance. Personally, I didn’t find the language of Shakespeare very hard in my scene because there were no advanced type language however some of the meaning of the words were quite hard to understand such as “chidden” “follies” and “to relish a Love-song like a Robin-red-breast”.

The skills I have developed are being able to stand still throughout a performance because I would usually dance a bit or fidget with my hands so I’ve learnt to master the art of a neutral position and only move about when needed. Also, I’ve developed my Shakespeare vocabulary and understand a few words.