Response to direction

Throughout the process, I was given various notes and suggestions on how to improve what I was doing. This constructive criticism helped push me to think into what I was doing in greater detail and to discover what was most appropriate for each moment of the play. I used these notes in order to think how my character would react to everything and what he was thinking as well as showing in each scene. I'll talk about a few of my most useful notes and how I used these to improve what I was doing on stage.

One note I had was to be more challenging towards Mr Banks and have more tension in the scene. Originally, I made my monologue passive aggressive and tried to contain how I was feeling. However, this wasn't very successful in getting my point across and didn't show as much contrast after the significant beat change in the scene. I tried it again in the next run and made my speech sharper, ruder and very patronizing. This was successful as it emphasized the difficulty of what Banks wanted to achieve and made my decision to belittle him bolder and clearer. This set the tone for the later scenes and made the play more interesting. 

Another note was that I was being too casual on stage. This took away from the status of my character as well as being less historically accurate. After this, I decided to do more character research and to research how men acted in the Victorian era in order to work on my posture and physicality on stage. I improved this my having better posture by being more upright and being more grounded. This made my character come across as being more formal, hence heightening the atmosphere of the scene and having an impact on the relationship between the characters. This was successful as it pushed the awkward tension in the scene and showed my high status and power. 

Finally, a crucial note was to keep my acting interior and subtle. This meant that I wouldn’t reveal too much in the scene. Furthermore, this prevented me from doing too much and making a moment less naturalistic or believable. This noted was for when I was telling Tess that she had failed her exams. It was important to not appear too happy as this would be very unsuitable considering the circumstances and would get the character in trouble. Moreover, this would make the character come across as a villain rather than someone who was trying to do what he thought was best. I decided to keep the happiness of them failing as this is how my character would genuinely feel, however I made it more subtle by changing my mannerisms and the firmness or my handshake in order to show this. I pretended to be sad towards the characters while subtly smiling after I had done this.