Approach to the Theatre's next Lesson for the RTDA

So this time I have commandeered my Dad's beloved home PC/glorified CD player to update with because I am still sans Laptop. I would have done it once again on the Kindle, because it wasn't a problem, its just that to write that relatively short update I did on Saturday took me two and a half hours. I will however be back up and running with a new Laptop very soon so updates will be quicker and more frequent.

Recently my studies for the RTDA (Room at the Top Drama Academy) have been slightly cut down hours wise due to the increasing demands on my time from work and from my Maths course. However having now completed my mulling over of 'King Lear' and finishing chapter two of 'Approach to the Theatre' I am moving on to chapter three and further analysis of text.

This book is very interesting and it has pointed me down the road of studying texts more, getting the feel of them which is something I have slowly dismissed and gotten lazy at in the past two years. According to chapter three the next move is to study the pace that is set by dramatic events and the suitability of a play from the writing. This book was printed in the mid to late 1950s so its ideas of what a suitable piece to read and put on generally is a Shakespeare or a Sheridan, which I followed for the chapter two unit, for chapter three I have decided to ignore the suggestion of something old (in relation to this book) and go for something contemporary (again in relation to this book) something that does not necessarily fit the brief given by Frances Mackenzie. I have chosen the 1972 play 'Monologue' by Harold Pinter which I am mad about, and have been since the tender age of Sixteen, because I want to give myself the impetus to really study hard to analyse the piece like I have never done so before. I find that if I give myself a real task to do then it will lead to a much better output on my part, you ask me to read a play I will do it and if I like it I will generally make my mind up on it right there and then and it gives me a blinkered outlook. I have for several years had a closed mind on Monologue, I even have proof of that. Go have a listen to my dry reading of it for my 'Radio' version (you can find it down the side of the blog or click here) because it is bad and it is one dimensional and Pinter always says more than it seems at first glance. I want to read and study Monologue to really guage its depth as a piece of Theatre and the format that Mackenzie gives, which I will go into and explain at greater length when I conclude chapter three, provides a distinct challenge to my imagination and subjectivity.

I will let you know how I get on very soon indeed...

Xtofer

RTDA an update and explanation

So about two weeks ago LibraryGirl's laptop finally gave up the ghost, may it rest in peace, so I have been unable to update this blog and have now resorted to writing it on my Kindle. It is a bit difficult but I have been itching to post for over a week so it was this or nothing and nothing was not an option! 


So onto the RTDA and the great tome 'Approach to Theatre'. When I last left you I said I had read King Lear and let you know how I got on, well I got on . . . well. I found Lear to be a riveting tale that has a lot of potential as a farce if it wasn't so tragic. To start I have to admit I really didn't like Lear himself who acts more like a pectulant child than the King of England. He bases the division of his Kingdom on a daughters single refusal to showboat her love for him. The denouncing and demonisation of this daughter is a shocking scene akin to a public flogging. After all this when his other daughter's started mistreating him I just didn't care. He was a contemptible character and there was no tragedy for me by the end and SPOILER ALERT!!!




When his daughter he denounced at the beginning dies with him at the end I just felt like Lear got his comeuppence. In the main plotline there was no sympathy for Lear, his actions and his selfishness were his downfall and no amount of moaning was going to make him sympathetic. The illegitimate son and love triangle plotline involving Edgar and the two daughters Lear favours seems like a staple of ribald comedy that became popular in the regency period, and is still very popular today, that would be very funny if it wasn't for the underlying themes of patricide and regecide. There is my biggest problem with Lear, it is just doom and gloom throughout. King Lear does not have the morality difficulties that plagues Macbeth and it doesn't put you on the edge of your seat like Othello where you are watching and willing someone to stop that vile villain Iago. Lear is a flat play that depressed me and had no payoff at the end, I don't need a happy ending and Romeo and Juliet which had a similar ending, sorry more spoilers, at least left us with hope that the war between the families was over. Lear gives you nothing inspirational or good just bleakness.


Staging Lear at least seems cheap and simple. The settings are basically great halls and the great outdoors. A throne is pretty much all the scenery you will need so it really is a simple production and that is how I would do it. I would minimise the amount of set but have a huge throne to dwarf Lear to show how small a man he truly is. My direction for the piece would not be sympathetic to Lear I would side with the daughters initially but after act two I am not sure what I as a director could do but present the action as it comes. This play comes down to each individual audience member making their own mind up about Lear. I think to a point the daughters have a point in their quarrel with Lear but murder is never the answer. So does he deserve to die? I think a more appropriate question is how would I tackle this piece? I gave my initial ideas but I keep pondering about it, i've been pondering for four weeks, and maybe that is this play's redeeming feature for me.

127 Hours and The Kings Speech

At the Weekend LibraryGirl and myself went to the Connaught Theatre to watch two different films with one thing in common both lead males have been nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award. They are 127 Hours and The King's Speech and both were fantastic films with brilliant performances.


127 Hours is based on the true story of Aron Ralston a climber who whilst enjoying the canyons of Utah gets his arm trapped between a canyon wall and a massive stone. His hand is crushed and he cannot move from the spot he is trapped in. Left with barely any water, hardly any food and only a cheap 'made in china' knife he tries to survive the life threatening situation he is in. As he tries to escape and begins to grasp how bad the situation is he contemplates his life and nearly gives up until he removes his arm, on the fifth day he is trapped, with the now blunt knife. He then hikes eight miles before he is finally rescued. It is a fabulous story of human resource and survival told incredibly well by Danny Boyle but realised in a virtuoso performance by Franco.


I was not surprised to read that James Franco was nominated for the Oscar after watching his performance in the Cinema, in fact after watching his performance I just decided he should get the Oscar because it just was so good. He basically did a one man play on film laying a whole character bare, a whole human life for us to gaze at. He went through so many changes in the 93 minutes of the film, which isn't something out of the ordinary but it was when you consider that this represented 127 hours of one man's life. It was mesmerising to see this cocky mountaineering guy get trapped and then have to face the realities of what his life choices had caused him as he waited to die. Franco portrayed a man who understood his situation and was dealing with it in the best way he could but he also showed the intelligence of the character who only about 24 hours into his ordeal realises the only way he can get out is to hack off his arm yet also knows he doesn't have the right tools. You saw everything that Franco was thinking, every through line, every thought was a real thought it seemed. There was no faking or falsity in the performance (there couldn't be because of the way it was shot) but it still required the great skill of a fine actor like James Franco to pull it off. 127 hours is now one of my favourite films because of the performance of Franco and the excellent source material and script co-written by Danny Boyle. Will Franco win the Oscar? Probably not because this year is Firth's year it seems and I also think that the performance Firth gave in 'The King's Speech' was just... well shall we get to that now?

The King's Speech is without a shadow of a doubt one of the best British Films in years and has rightly earned a huge amount of accolade. Charting the problems of the soon to be King George the VI this film starts with a scene based in the old Wembley Stadium where the then Duke of York stutters through a speech at the end of the year's Empire Exhibition and leads us up to his first WWII speech to the people of the UK and the British Empire. The Duke of York is played by the brilliant Colin Firth who has really hit his stride it seems recently with his performances in films. Colin Firth plays the conflicted Prince Albert who has had a stammer since his early years, which has been made worse by the need for him to speak over the radio to the people of the Empire in his role as one of the Royal Family. When his brother refuses to stop his dalliances with Mrs Wallis Simpson it becomes more obvious Albert may have to take the throne over and it is of vital importance that the King not stammer. The plot may not sound great but its the performances that make this film the sensation it is and the performance by Firth is just a beautiful thing. Essentially the role is this: a man who has to keep his life private yet remain in the public eye, must be diplomatic at all times, be a servant of the people and most of all live up to everyone's expectations no matter how big or small. It is a very large ask for anyone to do that job and to be all those things but Colin Firth portrays them all very well. His performance reminded me of what I heard Dame Judi Dench say on A:M a few weeks ago 'Someone once said to me, don't try and play all the part at once, play it a bit at a time and hopefully by the end you will have something that's whole' which I took to mean that there are many facets to a character but you should never try to do the whole character all at once. After all where does the character go in scene two if you have revealed all in scene one? Colin Firth did this perfectly, showing the insecurities and passions of a man who was not raised to be King but who became one of our greatest and taught our Queen how to be arguably the greatest monarch since Queen Victoria. Side by side there isn't much between the performances of Franco and Firth, both played real people and both showed why they are so well respected as performers. However for me the problems that Aron was facing in 127 Hours was in our faces the whole way through the film and we couldn't get away from it and so Franco had everything just hanging out there from the moment of the accident. In 'The King's Speech' because of the very nature of the subject and the character Firth played he could be more guarded and downplay the drama of the films situation. There was more depth to Firth's performance than in Franco's and that is why I believe he deserves the Oscar nod.

Both these films are phenomenal so run run run to the Cinema and don't come back until you have seen both!



RTDA: The Entertainer by John Osbourne presented by the BBC.

So this week my new mp3 player arrived and after spending a good few hours organising my music collection, the shows and soundtrack folder is jam packed, I started looking at my spoken word resources. Here in the UK we may have the best broadcasting organisation in the world with the BBC as they put on so many great productions and programmes both on the television and their various radio stations. Over the years I have recorded and collected a wide range of plays and programmes on the theatre always with it in mind to listen to them, much like my issues with my book collection, but now I have actually put a selection onto my mp3 with the idea of listening while I work. This week I put on a couple of programmes and plays but the big one that I had was a BBC Worldwide production of 'The Entertainer' by John Osbourne featuring Bill Nighy as Archie Rice the main character. I once tried to read 'The Entertainer' because of having read 'Look Back in Anger' and loving the characters and I found it slightly hard to follow and not very compelling. I should probably add that this was when I was 17 and really had only just been introduced to work the likes of Pinter and Osbourne so I was learning slowly. Then around the beginning of December I was looking through one of my monologue books and came across one of the Archie Rice speeches and was hooked by his laid back malice. So when I put the play on I was hoping to enjoy the whole thing.

I worked and listened and found myself sucked into this family that just exists, much like Britain after WWII the rice family just exists. It doesn't prosper and it has no future according to its main protagonists. Nighy was brilliant as Archie playing him in the first three quarters with so much charm that I believed I had the character down all wrong, that I must have misheard and misread all the information I had found about the play. Then nearer the end he becomes nastier as it transpires he has fallen for some floozy and has no interest in his wife or family any longer. By the time he puts his elderly father back on the stage you hate Archie Rice and realise that he plays the role of genial gentleman and comic 24/7 even with his immediate family just so he can get what he wants from life. I found the play very interesting and entertaining as well. I look forward to listening to more BBC productions on BBC 7 in the coming weeks.

I recommend anyone who wants to experience some of the best actors in the UK playing some fantastic roles to go straight to the BBC Radio website and check out Radio 4 and Radio 7.