END OF PHASE 1

Yesterday was my Bronze certificate exam at RADA, I felt like it went well, now comes the wait for the results! This marks the end of the first phase of the project. From here on in, it gets a little bit more loosely "play a day" and rather more varied as a self-study project.

My plan going forward includes a soft start this week (I have a planned break at the end of the month already) but should be fully in place to start at the beginning of April, and the new requirements are as follows.

• 3 plays read per week to include one Shakespeare/Classical.
• 1 play seen live or film adaptation per week.
• 1 other film per week seen for the first time. (should be something new at the cinema but might be an older film I just never got round to seeing)
• 1 acting class per week
• 1 choir session per week
• 1 monologue work session per week with research and feedback (some of these can be 1-on-1 EAS classes)
• 3 workout sessions per week to include one long walk and at least one Dancebase class.

I will also be continuing with the Shakespeare And His World online course, and working towards wrapping up Phase 2 in June/July with auditions for the performance class at EAS for the Autumn term, and hopefully the Silver Certificate exam if everything goes to plan.

There will be 4 phases in total, each reliant on completing the previous one, but in an ideal world, Phase 3 will be a longer session which ends with an EAS performance and the Gold certificate exam, and leads into Phase 4 being applications and auditions.

We're On A Break

I've been dragging my heels on this project for a couple of weeks, with every excuse from being abroad to having a bit of a cold to just not being in the mood for reading/writing on a day. I've added a few new things to my schedule - I'm doing an online course on Shakespeare And His World, and starting in April I'm planning to join a choir. My Shakespeare exam at RADA is this weekend. This isn't defeat or an end to the project entirely, just taking a few weeks off to focus on other things, during which time I will take some time to work out how best to restart "season two" of this blog. It will probably involve more movies, more emphasis on the various activities and classes I'm doing, more structure to what and when I read and how I write about it.

I just want to say a quick thank you to those who have been reading and following this blog along the way so far, and if you have any suggestions as to things you'd like to see - deeper thoughts on what I do in class, plays you think I should read, activities I should add to my weekly schedule... leave a comment. I can't guaruntee to use everything, but I'll do what I can (within reason!)

Day 106: The Artist Man and Mother Woman, by Morna Pearson

It's always a little bit awkward to watch a grown man submit to an overprotective mother. It's never expressly stated but I get the impression the "Artist Man" might be very easily played as rather autistic, though it seems to stem more from the dysfunctional relationship at home, where at forty-something he still lives with just his aging mother. His father is dead and this is only mentioned briefly and skated over in a scene that could be played in so many different ways. When he ventures out to the shops alone for apparently the first time in his life, and advertises for a date, she does everything she can to stop it - including murder, though this it once again only strongly implied rather than exactly stated. I was left with the strong impression that perhaps he doesn't really know about his differences, that maybe he has been so sheltered that stretched to not telling him of a diagnosis (though his interactions with the few people he meets at the shop and through his dating ad make it painfully obvious that he doesn't have much in the way of social skills, dispite being an apparently successful art teacher)

This play is written "in dialect" and while I've struggled with this before, I am starting to get the hang of particularly the scottish terms - I think partly being in a weekly drama class with mostly-accented classmates has helped to attune my ear. I didn't find I was slowed down nearly as much by it this time, and was drawn into the story with a deep sympathy for the vulnerable and smothered Geoffrey.

Day 104: The Awkward Squad, by Karin Young (Day 105 is day off)

Penultimate "Plays for Today by Women" installment. Interesting take on the class divide, using memoires of the mining strikes as a parallel for more recent financial problems in a family with roots in the mining community but aspirations of a middle-class life. Naturally everyone's apparent success is short-lived and there are secrets each is keeping from the others, making for an engaging read and I'm sure, an exciting play in production. Not much in the way of monologues apart from the character in her late 60s, but definitely one to keep to hand if I ever need pair or group work scripts.

I feel like I'm running out of things to say specifically about all these plays, I may need to rethink why I'm doing this project. Firstly the reading is to get a better feel for what's out there as well as returning to a few old favorites. I've probably read more plays in the last 100 days than I had in my entire life previously. This blog is meant to be a check that I am focussed while I'm reading, that I can take something away from it and articulate that in writing. It's partly telling that the blogs written when I haven't had the opportunity to talk to someone else about what I've been reading tend to be shorter, and more often seem to be full of missed points or even straight up admissions that I didn't like the play. That's a tricky one to solve - ideally this blog should be a way of having that discussion myself, without the need for an external ear. I have never been all that good at factual writing. Essays at school were a chore, even lab reports and projects at university were a slog. Where this project has fallen down has almost exclusively been the writing side of things. So, I might try mixing things up a bit. Maybe in future posts sometimes there will be character explorations, or fiction written taking the play as inspiration. I'll probably feel a bit silly doing things that way for a while, but if it refreshes the blog a bit and makes it easier to maintain, then that can only be a good thing.

Day 103: Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare (BBC 1982 film adaptation)

I'm revisiting Cymbeline as the date for my Shakespeare Certificate exam approaches, since my monologue is one of Imogen's speeches. I was hoping to see if someone else's approach to the lines might help me get over the block I've been experiencing - Sod's Law being all-knowing, the entire speech was omitted from this particular version. It did give me an interesting perspective on the character though (played by a very young Helen Mirrin) as almost entirely opposite to how I initially read her. I suspect part of the difference comes from the style of the production - the whole thing felt very melodramatically Shakespeare, rather than the naturalistic approach that seems to be more common in recent play adaptations. But more specifically, Imogen looked a lot less like the wayward heir type on screen as on paper, less angry and stubborn and more hurt and broken.

This has led me to think more about the character type I see in Imogen based on my reading, and I think possibly looking up the "Kate/Bob" episodes of Blackadder might be closer to what I had been hoping to do. It's all valuable research though - seeing it done in a way I hadn't considered and that doesn't feel right for me still means engaging and understanding why it doesn't fit. (I should add, I'm not saying it's a bad performance or even the wrong decision for the production, it's just different and not how I want to do it, and I'm in a position to make that decision for myself.)

Day 102: War Horse (National Theatre simulcast)

I saw the film version of War Horse over the Christmas holidays, and have been looking forward to the opportunity to see the stage show since. It's a slightly different retelling of the story - some elements and characters are changed or combined... I may need to read the original book just to see which bits came from where.

This is an extremely emotional play, the puppetry is utterly fantastic. I was half-expecting something along the lines of the shadow-style puppets from The Lion King, but these were so much more dynamic and lifelike. The program mentions two years of workshop time that went into designing the look, movement and handling of the horses and the result is about as close to living horses as it's possible to have on stage. There was almost no set at all, just a few props where absolutely required - making the barbed wire scene all the more striking for being the only part of the play where the set actually took up the full extent of the stage. The score was fantastic as well, combining cinematic mood music and live singing of war songs (mostly by a "narrator" type character, but occasionally taken up by the rest of the cast). The minimalist set complemented by a constant soundtrack is similar to the staging of Coriolanus, the last NT simulcast I saw. Obviously this show has been running rather longer so I can't entirely put it down to being a current fashion or anything, but it's an interesting parallel. Partly I suspect less set and more sound translates better to screen than a busy stage with no music, so it may be that productions in this style lend themselves to simulcast screenings better.

Day 101: Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, by Christopher Marlowe

This is the second of Marlowe's plays I've read. Having seen a film yesterday which seems in favour of the theory that "Marlowe wrote/was Shakespeare" I have to categorically disagree. It's clear from the language it was written about the same time (and in the same verse form) but the way Marlowe uses that language is completely different. There's less distinction made in the speech patterns of various classes (courtiers vs slaves, etc) and the level to which it averages out is less grandiosely poetic. This does have the benefit of requiring less deciphering, but with less imagery it becomes far less interesting to read.

On an entirely unrelated note, this play contains possibly the least believable suicide method I've yet come across in any play of any era... headbutting prison bars hard enough to split your own skull and literally dash your own brains out, in one hit. And two people die this way. I'm almost intregued as to how you'd even begin to stage something like that and not have it come across as utter comedy.

As for the storyline, I found myself drawing parallels with the "backstory" and opening scenes of Coriolanus, and how that story could have gone if he'd been a little less utterly backstabbed and a bit more silver-tongued. Tamburlaine pretty much seems to show up, recieve an envoy from whatever army he's up against this time, and in the space of half a page of diatribe convinces them to not only surrender, but join him. When he finally comes up against the Sultan, he placates basically the only man in the world who seems likely to be able to stop him by... marrying his daughter. Not quite as implausible as death by headbanging, I guess.