Playhouse Creatures 15 - Evaluation

Looking back on the performance I was suddenly struck with how far my groups had come. We started out with basic shells of characters, as one does when one picks up a script for the first time. It's much like meeting someone for the first time where you having nothing more than a name and a conversation. However over the last few weeks I have discovered so much about Liz and also about myself. Before this play I had never even contemplated motherhood or having to lose everything the way she did. Discovering that part of myself was incredible. I connected so much with Liz, realising the mother inside myself and discovering how deeply it affected me was incredibly eye opening, which was probably what made me so passionate about the role. I think that's something I'm truly proud of and think I did well in the performance, enjoying the role and becoming her. I feel like when I was on stage performing, I realised that I have an Elizabeth Farley within myself; childish, full of laughter and charisma however also proud and ambitious. She is ambitious, and that does lead to her downfall. I think the abortion scene was so effective, and it took so much work. Multiple ideas were tried out. Some were discarded, some evolved to be the final product. I think that the time we took on making that scene work and the direction we received from Andy and Jerry-Lee was what made it work so much. At first it was so basic and full on, however we tried turning the chair around so the audience would only see the back of me which turned out to be an incredibly effective move. Whereas before we'd been spaced out, leaving me more isolated, which on one level worked symbolically, however it didn't have the same dramatic effect and when the other girls were directed to stand close together, huddling around my chair, I think it led to a realisation within our group about the characters. Whilst their friendships may be antagonistic, particularly between Mrs Marshall and Mrs Farley, they tried their utmost to stand together.

That's another thing that I think worked well, was the dynamics between the women. This is shown so beautifully in the relationship between Mrs Marshall and Liz, when they're tying each others corset laces and you can see in an almost sisterly dynamic. Liz babbling on, giggling and laughing and winding up Rebecca, with the other woman rolling her eyes and allowing Liz to get to her, much like a older sister would. We were running the scene on the week of our production in full costume and Sophia decided to improvise really yanking on my corsets when I say the line "Well what do they want you there for?", and I couldn't help letting out a small squeak of surprise, and it ended up working really well. Sophia and I would often exchange looks and eye rolls whilst drama was happening, and there was also a lovely moment between Nell and Liz when Mrs Marshall's telling Otway about her idea for a play, where Heta and I argue over whether Monimia should live a lie or tell him. It was moments like that that defined the performance for me and made it so enjoyable to perform. These moments and dynamics came not so much from the rehearsing our lines but from the improv games we played and time we took to discover our own and each other's characters. Taking that bit of extra time to develop those friendships between the girls was such a good idea and led to some wonderful acting.

There were also parts that didn't go as well as I had hoped, particularly in the moment of the performance. For example, whilst running the abortion scene backstage we got to such a fantastic point of emotion, where I was crying and begging the girls to help me, actually reaching out for Mrs Marshall and everyone watching said it was so effective. However, on the night, for some reason it just didn't happen the same way. I didn't quite reach the point of emotion whereby I was so in the moment that I felt able to cry, and I think that's because I was thrown by the last minute changes in dynamic. Were it possible for me to go back and redo it, I'd take more time in rehearsals to play around with that abortion scene and get comfortable with the ideas I now wish I'd had the confidence to just go with on the night of the performance, despite the lack of preparation. I think that's something I should try to do a little more in the next unit, is play around with ideas and absolutely exhaust every possible scenario and idea before finally settling on the best. 

Moreover, however, I was really happy with the performance we gave. I worked so unbelievably hard on the acting, costume and generally everything in this production, and I've very pleased with how well it worked out. The dynamics between all the actors were excellent and I think that keeping in mind the super objective and being so passionate about the themes of feminism made it so much easier to convey them. Perhaps my next target would be to achieve that level of hard work and commitment on something I'm not so naturally passionate about.

Playhouse Creatures 14

The Restoration Period

The play is set in the second half of the 1600’s during the Restoration Period. The Restoration Period came about after the end of the English Civil War, or the Wars Of the Three Kingdoms, which was waged between the English, Scottish and the Irish and started when King Charles the 2^nd came to power. Along with the Restoration of the monarchy came the end of the Puritan regime which had been upheld by Oliver Cromwell, this regime had previously been discrediting and even dismantling a lot of the theatres. When the Restoration period started all of these theatres were reopened and the King invested in the development of the theatre, with the two leading companies – The Kings Men and The Duke’s Men, beginning to experiment with staging, lighting and writing of new plays. With this came the first female actresses, an idea that King Charles the 2^nd brought over from his exile in France.

Actresses at that Time

Whilst King Charles the 2^nd was exiled in France during the British Civil War, he was introduced to the concept of female actresses which had already come about in France. Before he instated the female actresses in England all female roles had been played by boys, usually before they had hit puberty and had their voices dropped, and the new wave of female actresses changed the form of theatre. Now, men came to see the women, who were often given roles involving them baring their breasts, and the sexualisation of women was one of the primary uses of the theatre. This was for another reason, which was that actresses got paid very little, only just enough to live on and not enough to support them once they left the theatre. What actresses would have to do would be to become the mistress of a wealthy man who would become her Protector. At first actresses were thought of as little more than prostitutes and many men would treat them as such. However, Actresses And Whores suggests that “The success of the actress/whore also suggests that ‘whoreishness’ was not always already negative during the Restoration...whore implies that her audience might also have recognised her as a challenging and transgressive woman” (page 25, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society, Kirsten Pullen, 2005)

Your Character

Although I did not find a huge amount of information on Mrs Farley, what I did find was incredibly interesting. Elizabeth Weaver, maiden name Farley had a very interesting life. For starter, she was apparently never married to James Weaver of Grays Inn, as she claimed, in fact the same James Weaver sued the poor woman for £30. It was later discovered that she was pregnant with his supposed child. She was subsequently sued no less than 5 times by Miles Lovett (3rd March 1663), Robert Kerby (13th June 1663), David Little (March 1664), George Langford and Henry Rooke (1665) and Francis Poyntz and Anne Hame (1665). She did, however, continue to act.

References

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TGgS9VxWJ0oC&pg=PA305&lpg=PA305&dq=elizabeth+farley+restoration+actress&source=bl&ots=MO-ue9OXvK&sig=1_0bhdqZmrKroTDN78i7j5HgWaA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8mITU9iHEsyk7QawyIGQDA&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=elizabeth%20farley%20restoration%20actress&f=false

http://www.samuelfrench-london.co.uk/p/5558/playhouse-creatures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_(England)

http://www.cwu.edu/~robinsos/ppages/resources/Theatre_History/Theahis_10.html

Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society, by Kirsten Pullen http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9eu_n-etYpUC&pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq=female+actresses+restoration&source=bl&ots=wdzBwuxxHT&sig=Q2rH6fQRzv4sQ6fRZrrT3qWU6eQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CMvTUsvBB8iVhQfz14HwCQ&ved=0CEkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=female%20actresses%20restoration&f=false

Playhouse Creatures 13

Super Objective

A super objective of a play is the main theme or message that the story is working towards conveying. In Playhouse Creatures the most predominant is feminism. Of course the play is hugely feminist, it's an almost entirely female cast about the first actresses in Great Britain. It's really interesting to see how April De Angelis does this, for example the fact that all of the women are incredibly strong characters, another is that there aren't actually any men in the play who aren't being stood up to. Rochester is played by Mrs Barry, Otway is teased and manipulated by all the actresses. It's very clever and wonderfully fun to play around with. As a strong feminist I have been constantly been keeping the idea of feminism in mind with all my acting.

However I think that De Angelis is doing more than saying how sexist society was back then, I think that if you look at the amount of anachronisms in the play, for example Rochester's acting lesson with Mrs Barry is about 300 years before it's own time, and Doll being an eternal, timeless character who never seems to age, then you can see that the play write is actually holding a mirror up to the audience. She is raising the question about whether the characters in the play are really so different from women today. It's very clever, and it works. I think that whilst our society is far more advanced in the areas of sexism there is still a long way to go and that we can learn a lot from these messages in the play. I have kept this in mind whilst developing Mrs Farley's character and performing as her.