Wednesday

Today was our first day of two performances, with a matinee and an evening show. We started the morning with some notes of the previous days performance, in order to see what could be improved, taking the audience reactions we gained into consideration. For example, we became aware that some jokes fell flat, whilst things that we didn't think would work worked really well. I have found that interacting with the audience adds something to the performance, because our 'urge' or motivation is to share knowledge in a captivating way.

The audience reacted well today, and no major mistakes took place. We warmed up individually, and i focussed on each different character that i become, making myself find the traits and characterization of each. I found that this helped me to warm up for the performance, because i was more aware of how much energy i needed in order to portray all these characters realisticly, in a way that the audience could follow the narrative.

The post show discussions are always interesting, because students will throw answers or questions that we would not have expected. Our director Mark was slightly horrified when one young man referred to Macbeth as a book; in his defense, it's no surprise he thinks it is a novel if the first time he has been introduced to it is in an English classroom environment. It is also nice to hear what the audience think of the different ways of staging Shakespeare, because we do throw a lot of different ideas to them in order for them to formulate their own arguments and opinions.