Some Script Work

In today's rehearsal, our movement director wasn't with us so we had a heavily text based lesson. We looked at one of Hamlet's most famous monologues. A basic explanation is it's just Hamlet explaining how to act. It has some very useful advice to actors.

Here is a translation of the speech, I have highlighted the parts I found most important:

Perform the speech just as I taught you, musically and smoothly. If you exaggerate the words the way some actors do, I might as well have some newscaster read the lines. Don’t use too many hand gestures; just do a few, gently, like this. When you get into a whirlwind of passion on stage, remember to keep the emotion moderate and smooth. I hate it when I hear a blustery actor in a wig tear a passion to shreds, bursting everyone’s eardrums so as to impress the audience on the lower levels of the playhouse, who for the most part can only appreciate loud noises and pantomime shows. I would whip a guy for making a tyrant sound too tyrannical. That’s as bad as those old plays in which King Herod ranted. Please avoid doing that.

We also did some sight-reading of some scenes and blocking them. It was really interesting to see how others and myself, would perform when we aren't that familiar with the scenes. I feel like I performed well in my scene and I think sight reading is something that I am quite comfortable with. The only problem with reading from the script and acting it out at the same time, is sometimes the meaning of what you're saying can get lost because you focus on physicalising it much more than focusing on what the words mean. 

Here is David Tennant performing a small section of one of my scenes.