So our production is just one month away, and now that we’ve established our characters and our script, we've gotten down to the serious business of rehearsing. We’ll be going over our rehearsal techniques in more detail over the coming weeks – but first, allow us to bring you up to speed with what we’ve done up until now.
When we began planning this project in January, we knew we wanted to build on our cast members’ character development skills, and give them the space to create intriguing fictional personalities of their own.
We also knew we wanted to produce something which was a logical step forward from our previous productions. Last year, our work was fairly location centric, and explored the city of Manchester as a kind of personality.
So we decided that with this production, we were going to keep the city setting, but make it less Manchester specific, and more anonymous. Something Rosie and I also agreed upon was that a night-time setting would be the best fit for it, as it’s usually the darker hours which tend to bring out the real eccentricity in characters.
And from there, our setting was born: a naïve character, accustomed to the workings of the day time, finds themselves stranded in an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night. To get home, they have to navigate their way through a labyrinth of weird and diverse characters – an urban, modernised Alice in Wonderland if you like.
With our setting decided on, over the next few months our workshops at LTCC revolved around establishing the real focus of the play – the characters.
We started off by canvassing the group and asking ourselves as individuals who our favourite characters are – be they fictional or real – and why. The answers were varied and diverse, ranging from Lara Croft to Eric Cantona, and from Jeff Bridges’ ‘The Dude’ to Jay Gatsby.
Taking various aspects of these favourite characters into account, we then gave each cast member a role to fulfil in the play – a crooked policeman, an ethical conman, a vagrant – but we didn’t give them any detail. The specifics of their character would be up to them.
We then embarked on a series of exercises, involving both improvisation and careful thinking – the goal of which was to help cast members form and develop their characters’ personalities. To really bring their creations to life and make them believable, cast members worked hard to devise their characters’ pasts and ask themselves questions such as: What is my character’s attitude to life? Why is my character the way he/she is? What might have happened to them in their past to make them like this? (I'll be talking more about the specific exercises we used to aid this process in the coming weeks.)
Once they had the basics of their creations down, cast members developed ‘character bibles’. They carried these notebooks with them at all times, scribbling down any thoughts relating to their characters, be it an important life event, a specific attitude to life, or even an internal monologue. Each week, cast members shared and discussed their thoughts, and it wasn’t long before all the characters in the group became incredibly fleshed out and well-acquainted with each other.
We were then in a very strong position creatively – we had 10 deep, well developed characters, all with their own goals and needs in life. All that needed to be done then was to work out how they felt about each other, and slot them together - a process which I’ll be talking about in part 2.
When we began planning this project in January, we knew we wanted to build on our cast members’ character development skills, and give them the space to create intriguing fictional personalities of their own.
We also knew we wanted to produce something which was a logical step forward from our previous productions. Last year, our work was fairly location centric, and explored the city of Manchester as a kind of personality.
So we decided that with this production, we were going to keep the city setting, but make it less Manchester specific, and more anonymous. Something Rosie and I also agreed upon was that a night-time setting would be the best fit for it, as it’s usually the darker hours which tend to bring out the real eccentricity in characters.
And from there, our setting was born: a naïve character, accustomed to the workings of the day time, finds themselves stranded in an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night. To get home, they have to navigate their way through a labyrinth of weird and diverse characters – an urban, modernised Alice in Wonderland if you like.
With our setting decided on, over the next few months our workshops at LTCC revolved around establishing the real focus of the play – the characters.
We started off by canvassing the group and asking ourselves as individuals who our favourite characters are – be they fictional or real – and why. The answers were varied and diverse, ranging from Lara Croft to Eric Cantona, and from Jeff Bridges’ ‘The Dude’ to Jay Gatsby.
Taking various aspects of these favourite characters into account, we then gave each cast member a role to fulfil in the play – a crooked policeman, an ethical conman, a vagrant – but we didn’t give them any detail. The specifics of their character would be up to them.
We then embarked on a series of exercises, involving both improvisation and careful thinking – the goal of which was to help cast members form and develop their characters’ personalities. To really bring their creations to life and make them believable, cast members worked hard to devise their characters’ pasts and ask themselves questions such as: What is my character’s attitude to life? Why is my character the way he/she is? What might have happened to them in their past to make them like this? (I'll be talking more about the specific exercises we used to aid this process in the coming weeks.)
Once they had the basics of their creations down, cast members developed ‘character bibles’. They carried these notebooks with them at all times, scribbling down any thoughts relating to their characters, be it an important life event, a specific attitude to life, or even an internal monologue. Each week, cast members shared and discussed their thoughts, and it wasn’t long before all the characters in the group became incredibly fleshed out and well-acquainted with each other.
We were then in a very strong position creatively – we had 10 deep, well developed characters, all with their own goals and needs in life. All that needed to be done then was to work out how they felt about each other, and slot them together - a process which I’ll be talking about in part 2.
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