4th november

First week back from the half term and we got given a script called our country's good. I am playing the character duckling who is a promiscuous women and my husband is called Harry , my objective is to be free as i am bored of him as he keeps nagging me and just is not any fun anymore. We have to be off script soon so we could start thinking of the actions we are going to use.

 The following lesson we started to learn our scripts and had to write next to it the objective and any actions that we feel would be good for our character to act our for example my character is frustrated so most of the actions would be sulking and shouting.Sharon gave us a script called medea and we all got split into groups of three and got given different sections in the play to rehearse, my group is on the last page and my section is the middle bit. 

We are going to be working with the musical theatre students with this script,  they are going to say the first two or three pages. 

Konstantin Stanislavski

Konstantin Stanislavski is a wealthy Russian theatrical director who was born in 1863 and died in 1938. He started working in the theatre from when he was a young teenager. He was a method actor and developed his acting skills as time went by performing with different acting groups not only in Russia but in the United states as well. He believed that actors had to really get into their roles by drawing own their own experiences to make it  seem more believable to watch. 

His family was descended from serfs ( which are slaves) they had prospered during the Industrial Revolution as producers and sellers of gold and silver thread.His father, Sergei Alekseev, was a rich Russian merchant and his mother, Elisaveta Vasilevna  was in fact a French-Russian and his grandmother was a  actress in Paris amazing right? Young Stanislavski grew up in a bilingual environment. He was very  fond of  Konstantin and how he grew up in luxury.  Konstantin  and his nine siblings were often taken to theatrical performances and concerts, and the family numbered famous Russian actors and dancers among their friends. Stanislavski supported the Russian Revolution of 1917, which put the  government of Vladimir Lenin in power in the new Soviet Union. Lenin in turn respected Stanislavski installing him in a small house next to the Moscow Art Theatre. 




Konstantin had a few known quotes but the one that caught my eye the most is '' There a no small parts only actors'' and if you think about it its true! A part can only be small if you yourself do not know how to develop it to make it big.

In 1898 Stanislavski along with his partner,  founded the Moscow Art Theatre, that  made an  influence on theatrical art all over the world. They opened with staging of "Tsar Feodor" a play by Aleksei Tolstoy, then staged "The Seagull" written by Anton Chekhov specially for the Moscow Art Theatre.He did not go to university but he worked in his family's business, in the early stages of his life Konstantin became a well known amatuer actor and with his families resources he decided to invite some of the most creative people in the area to establish a society of professional actors and artists.

Stanislavsky system requires that an actor should utilize, among other things such as  his emotional memory. The actor’s entrance onto the stage is considered to be not a beginning of the action or of his life as the character but a continuation of the set. The actor has trained his concentration and his senses so that he may respond freely to the total stage environment which is called method acting. Through  observation of people in many different situations, he attempts to develop a wide emotional range so that his onstage actions and reactions appear as if they were a part of the real world rather than a make-believe one.

Greek theatre.

Greek theatre:

The  Greek history started around  700 B.C ,a lot of the Greek city had a theatre because acting was basically apart of their culture, the actors were all men back in those days and they would wear masks to exaggerate any facial feature. The theatre was built on the hill sides that contained more than 18,000 spectators and formed in a circular shape so that when the actors are speaking everyone in the audience can hear what they are saying. A person called Aristotle was the first person to ever act on stage as a character rather than his self. Usually in the Greek  festivals all the actors and directors would play as the same person but that changed after a while as only three actors could be used in the plays.

The original plays were performed in the outdoor theatre in which masks were used by the performers and always were acted out by a chorus with three actors, the actors would go and change inside to play a different character no matter how many roles it would be they would just simply have no more people than that fixed amount. 

                                                The Playwrights

The Three well known Greek playwrights are: Sophocles , Euripides and Aeschylus. Aeschylus who competed in the city of Dionysia and wrote a few of the oldest tragedies in the world, not many of his plays survived he is also known as introducing the second actor on stage. The play write was born in 525 B.C. E  in a town called Eleuisis, he was shown to be a great writer from a young age but did not win any competitions for it until he got to his late 30's but somehow had good luck around that period and managed to win almost every time he entered.

Sophocles had only seven tragedies that survived which includes Antigone ,Electra and Oedipus Rex. He won twenty four amazing contests for his plays and in each did not place any lower than second place and introduced the third actor on stage. He was born in Colonus a place not so far from  Athens and was married twice a father of two sons. Sophocles was a priest , a politician and a leader in the military.

Euripides was a playwright who is believed to have written 90 plays while only 18 has survived which includes Medea , Hercules and the Trojan women. He always got criticized  for the way he would question traditional things on stage, after his death his plays were used as pattern for other authors. Euripides was born in Athens 485 B.C (which was many years ago) he died in Macedonia 406 B.C, he  was married and had  three sons. Euripides known for having strong complex female characters in his plays, they always seem to be a victim but end up being avengers.

The play Medea has around seven themes which are all related to her behavior during the play but the two main ones were  passion and revenge. Medea is a person who has a lot of emotion and love for her husband but his betrayal on her changed her love for him into rage. Second theme was revenge, Medea will do anything and everything she can to get revenge in the best way possible she even  kills her own children to hurt Jason.

The plays above have a lot of themes but these are the ones that they mainly have in common which are: Death , love , revenge , fate ,power, determination. This information can come in handy when i am trying to get into the character of my role because one of the themes in my play is mainly death and my character is Antigone and she wants to commit suicide so in a way it can make me get used to what i am meant to be acting and how i should act it due to the fact that i know it is centered around death.

My job as an actor when i am working on this scene is to present it how i know it should be done. My character is telling her own sister (Ismene) that she wants  to kill her self so I would have to put my self in that position and act as if I am really in that position so i could get into the role of that character and perform it well enough so it could look believable.

Over thousands of years many people go to the theatre to watch live performances to heighten their culture experience. The theatre is a place that brings people together and for many people going to the theatre is a tradition.