Yesterday was the day in which our seven weeks of work had led up to. We had worked in the new theatre and after our dress rehearsal I felt very sceptical about the performance that night. It was clear that our concept still did not work and we had not found the Arden school girls therefore the play lacked energy and purpose. Also there had been some line slip ups , adding to the stress of whether our play would actually be watch-able that night or just a really boring Shakespeare disaster.
However i feel that we improved a lot from the dress rehearsal. Everyone gave full energy to the performance and it came to life. I'm not sure if our Arden school concept fully translated to the whole audience however it was an extremely big challenge to carry two characters at all time on stage especially as one of these characters was extremely different to to anyone we really knew speaking different language and living in a completely different time frame. However given the challenge I think we mostly embraced it and managed to keep energy and not look like dead pan faced girls awkwardly placed in clumps on stage.
In terms of the As You Like it character relationships i think they really worked on the whole. Orlando and Jacques and a comedic chemistry which really got the audience involved , this relationship came together on the day of the performance. Due to little touches like this the play managed to achieve the light highlighted comedy which it was meant to be being a Shakespeare comedy. Myself and Rebecca also worked really hard on finding Touchstone and Audrey's relationship. Due to the difficult language it had been difficult to really understand how the felt about each other but in the play they were the foolish couple , meant to bring comedy to the play not deep love. I think we achieved this relationship and I found that as I made boulder choices with Touchstone , showing his lust to Audrey our scenes picked up and didn't stick out as slightly unwanted scenes. Another part of the play that I am proud of was me and Cielia and Rosalind's relationship. Particularly me and Cielia's. During the rehearsal process i think we had lacked a spark but during the last rehearsal and the performance we found our fiery relationship , due to this both of our lines made alot more sense and also the reason for Touchstones love for Ceilia was described. The energy that we bought to our performance really picked up the performance at parts and I think helped to keep the audience engaged through a confusing play in a very different language to the normal.
On a more negative note i feel like my performance lacked multi-layering. I dot think i ever really found my Arden school girl or knew how to actually allow her to come through in my performance. It was an extremely challenging task and as there weren't any scene of proper dialogue I found it hard to find a full characterisation. I was also focusing most of my energy on Touchstone as I knew that my performance had to be full of energy and I also had to make sure I spoke my riddly lines with confidence and truth. Therefore being able to fully get across my Arden girl was very hard and I don't feel like I really knew who my character was. I think this was generally a struggle for all of us. Though we had done some work on our characters I don't think we had done enough in the context of the play to be fully comfortable with our multi layering. Due to this reason I don't think our concept was as strong as it could of been.
The all girls cast worked well in my opinion. By the end of the play i had forgot that it was even different to have all girls playing male characters. Obviously this was partly due to our theme but mainly I think it was due to our character relationships. Which I think was the real strength of the performance. Silvius and Phebe conveyed there relationship of love and rejection perfectly succeeding to show this to the audience whilst also being extremely funny. Also Rosalind and Silvius's relationship was successful in showing Silvius's pure ignorance to Roalsind's clever wit and Phebe's love games.
Overall I think our performance went well and couldn't of really gone better on the night for our rehearsal time and concept. Though I don't think it was necessarily that much of a strong performance of a Shakespeare play we all worked very hard and i think characterisation and relationships were impressive for our first time doing Shakespeare as a company.
