All our hard work and team spirit made the performance memorable. The effort through the process created a powerful performance that showed and enhanced everybody’s skills. I made a conscious effort with my diction and more importantly my pace of speech, especially when the solicitor. I feel that the audience responded well to our diverse characters, and often found moments of humour when we least expected it. Even though we had to be in charge of taking on and off props, we helped each other and therefore the performance ran smoothly. I am very proud and pleased with how I and my fellow actors performed, and heard good feedback from members of the audience. Our initial worry was whether the audience would understand our non-linear structure, yet they understood and appreciated the performance as a whole. I feel, alongside with Faye, that the costume was suitable for the image we were trying to portray, and the minimal props used created the stark and cold atmosphere we wanted as a theatre company.
Immigration is a globally approached, sensitive topic. On the one hand, we are bombarded with migrants coming into the country for various reasons, and therefore require aspects such as jobs and housing. However, immigration has negative drawbacks for the migrants themselves; they often work longer hours for less money, and are exploited for their human rights by, for example, doing jobs that British people won’t or cannot do. However, due to personally experiencing passport and immigration control when travelling with my step-dad, I can understand the stress and anxiety caused when simply travelling within a multi-cultural family. Therefore, since then, I have had a natural attachment to the female viewpoint of immigration and prejudice.
The Bogus Woman by Kay Adshead takes real stories from female immigrants and combining them all into one powerful story. The female migrant stories are hidden by the media and we are ignorant of the negative impacts formed by the English officials. Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre is an immigration detention centre, where refugee families and women can go while their cases are being questioned. Unfortunately, similar to that of the young woman’s experience, there are many complaints of ill treatment;
“In September a former detainee at Yarls Wood immigration removal centre alleged that women held there fell prey to sexual advances and abuse by security guards and other officials. But by the time the claims were examined, two alleged victims had left the detention centre.”
This information would never be headlines in the local newspapers or within the 6pm television news, and we are constantly provided with a one sided negative portrayal of men and especially women who are trying to simply find a potentially safer and happier life for themselves;
“The bulk of the vulnerable women, over 85 percent, said that they had been either raped, or tortured in their home countries, while some 17 percent confessed they simply failed to tell the Home Office everything that had happened to them in their home country because they felt that in their culture it was hard to speak openly about such things”.
Well, well, well… Chatty Karen, what can I say? What an awful woman she is! A bigoted, opinionated guard with no respect for anyone. Out of the eleven characters I play in ‘The Bogus Woman’, this one has been by far the most challenging. Acting out such a racist character seemed so unnatural due to the language used and, as you can see by the video below, the first script in hand run through of this scene was awkward and somewhat uncomfortable.
23.5.14 rehearsals
Action Shot of me as ‘Chatty Karen’ (Daniella Scimeca, 2014)
Having someone film scenes was an extremely useful tool for myself, as personally, it enabled me to see my performance from an audience perspective. This meant that something I thought might have looked good such as a wink or a direct point to the audience, may not have necessarily worked as well from the outside looking in. From watching this first script in hand run through, it was evident that a lot of work needed to be done before Chatty Karen took to the stage. One of the most important tools that I had picked up from my last drama module, Advanced Scene Study was to produce a character profile. This would enable me to create a rounded picture for my characters, aiding differentiation between them and picking out individual traits that each character would embody. Similarly through creating character profiles, the objective of the scenes and super-objectives of the play can be found. James Thomas asserts that, “According to Stanislavski, all the individual minor objectives in a play should come together under the command under a single, controlling objective called the super-objective.” (2013, p.65)
I created a couple of drafts of a character profile for each of the charactrers I play in ‘The Bogus Woman’ with the drafts being amended after each rehearsal when specific characteristics were established. Below is my final Character profile for ‘Chatty Karen’.
Chatty Karen Character Profile
Definition of a Guard: Watch over in order to protect or control
Occupation: Group 4 guard – been in the job since the age of 21 and it is all she knows. Because of this she thinks she knows everything about everyone and is the cream of the crop out of the guards who work there. She does not care who she offends and is a bigot. Campsfield Detention Centre is a real life, privately run immigration detention centre near Oxford. Protests at conditions at the centre have sparked a number of hunger strikes and protests.
Age: 35
Ethnicity: White British
Background History: Did not do well at school. Is not the brightest woman around, because of this she became a guard who wanted to intimidate. Was a bully at school and therefore takes pleasure in belittling people in order to make herself feel good about herself.
Marital Status: Married to a bigot husband who has a one track mind and black and white view on situations. Because of him, she has the views she has on immigration. She’s in an unhappy marriage and because of this takes it out on the immigrants. She has no children.
Does she respect the beliefs of others?: Chatty Karen has no respect for anyone and is quite happy to offend and criticise the detainees to anyone who will listen. Anything that is different from her is wrong and therefore she disregards and disrespects them.
A trait of Admiration?: Her knowledge on the differences on the detainees and where they originate from.
Super-objective: To watch over the detainees and make sure everything stays in order – All of the characters in the play apart from the Young Woman act as obstructions from her freedom and get in the way of her truly being happy – Chatty Karen being the one who wants to make sure the Young Woman remains a detainee for as long as possible.
Scene Objective: To belittle the detainees as she ‘apparently’ knows everything there is about them. Wants the detainees to hear what she says about them as it makes her feel superior and more important than they are.
On Stage Characteristics:
Treats the audience like they are another guard on the break with her.
Head nods and laughs at lines she finds funny. For example: “Takes a plate of curried eggs to prise a paki out his gaff to have a dust about”
Racist language does not phase Chatty Karen in the slightest as it is everyday language to her.
Choice of language on stage is colloquial and laid back.
Glottal stops instead of pronouncing the letter ‘t’ in words.
Stern faces, emotionless expressions.
Slouched on chait with a cup of tea.
Creating character profiles for each of the 11 characters meant that it was a lot easier to manage who I was playing and what specific traits they had. For instance, with Chatty Karen as you can see from the profile above, She slouches on the chair with an emotionless expressions on her face.
Works Cited: Thomas, James, (2013) Script Analysis for Actors, Directors and Designers, CRC Press
As well as being an Actor within the company, my second role is of Assistant Theatre Technician. This means that I will produce technical elements that will be in the performance. Obviously, because of having a main acting role in the production, I will not physically be able to run lights or sound on the night, therefore the work I assisted with would need to be preparatory. It was decided between myself and the Head of Tech, Charlie, that I would be in charge of producing the projections included in the show. I have never been one for using technology and computer equipment much, but thought that this would be a good opportunity to try my hand at it. The software I used in order to create the projections was Windows Movie Maker, which is a freeware video editing software that enables the user to create and edit videos as well as sharing them. So, first things first was to read through the play along with the Director and Theatre Technician, in order to see where sounds, lights and projections were needed and why they were needed. So, it was decided that projections would be used at the beginning, for a preset, with facts and figures being presented to the audience in order to paint a picture for them on immigration and how it affects the country and the immigrants themselves.
Firstly, I created the preset video using real pictures from newspapers, but, after attempting to publish these on our private Facebook group, for the rest of the company to see I was not able to due to copyright restrictions, therefore it was decided that the video would need to be changed and adapted in order to be allowed to be shown to the audience. Here is are the Picture stills of the first opening projection, again due to copyright restrictions, the actual video could not be uploaded. Original opening video still. A cross fade effect was put on each picture on the video so as each new picture came up, the last one would slowly fade behind it meaning that one picture would flow nicely into the next one.This acted as a learning curve, and from this it was established that instead of using real pictures of newspapers, facts would be typed up and referenced using the company colours, orange and black, creating a simple yet effective message for the audience as they sat down at the beginning of the show. Here are the picture stills for the final opening Projection.
As a company, we collectively did not want too many projections as we wanted to take a minimalist approach. On the scenes where the Young Woman describes how much money she has left, I immediately sought information from the television show ‘Two Broke Girls’ whereby, whenever money is made, a picture appears on the screen with the amount they had, cross fading into the new amount of money they had made. The only difference being in ‘The Bogus Woman’ The Young Woman loses money rather than makes money, so the money she has is on the screen and cross fades into the money she finishes with. Here is an example of one of the money videos.
On the technical run day, my job was to plot the sound created by the theatre technician so that she could focus on the lighting. Plotting the sound means to, use the cue lines from the script to place the sounds into the software. After this it then needs to be determined how long the sound is going to play for and whether it needs to be looped on repeat, faded in and out, or simply snapping on and off.This was done using the software Q Lab which looks like this.
(Courtesy of Google Images, 2014)
Q Lab is a multimedia playback cue-based software designed for theatre and live entertainment by the company Figure 53. (Figure 53, 2007) It enables users to include sounds from different sources, merge them into the same format and create cross fades and snap outs from one sound to another. It is particularly useful in theatre as it means that once the sounds have been plotted, they can then be initiated on the night simply by pressing the enter button. This means that on the performance night, the Stage Manager as well as calling the show, can work the sounds simply and easily.
While researching into the play The Bogus Woman I began to look into the idea around human rights acts, which in the past I had not spent much time contemplating. The play I am directing is largely based upon the human rights of the young woman, who had to run away from her own country as she was a human rights journalist. The government back in her country were hunting her down because of her journalistic views on human rights and had killed all of her family, including her new born baby.
My lecturer gave me a magazine at the beginning of the semester called Amnesty International Magazine. When I started to investigate who they were I discovered that they were, ‘ordinary people from across the world standing up for humanity and human rights.’ (Amnesty, 2014) The group aim to defend freedom of expression, plea for justice aimed at crimes against humanity, and most importantly in my theatre company’s case, protect women’s rights.
Upon studying the real life stories within the Amnesty magazine I was shocked to discover that stories like The Bogus Woman were in fact true. I had a vague understanding of what happened in other countries but was not expecting it to be as severe and unjustified as within our play. ‘Most women’s experience of human rights violations are gendered, and many forms of discrimination or abuse occur because the victim is female. Women whose rights are being violated for reasons other than gender often also experience a particular form of abuse based on gender, such as sexual assault.’ (Peters, 1995, P.12) This helped me realise that the young woman in our play would have been prosecuted for being a female and also being a human rights journalist. Therefore, as a human being she would be broken and I had to get across to the audience how traumatic her situation was. I discovered that in some countries woman are stripped of basic human rights such as their own health, body and sexual lifestyle. It is stated that in so many countries woman are forced to have a life threatening birth as it is illegal to perform terminations in their own country. ‘In every part of the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, there are women working for human rights, (Amnesty, 2014) which gives a sense of hope to women in these countries that do not have basic human rights, just like our young woman in The Bogus Woman.
As a company we had already decided to do a collection of donations at the end of our performance for a group that helped protect woman and their basic human rights. Without any hesitation we all realised that it was Amnesty we would choose for our donations. Reading the powerful and truthful stories within the magazine and on their website made me appreciate the impact groups like this have on protecting women’s human rights. It also helped me to comprehend how the young woman in our piece would perhaps be feeling. I was able to direct Fran (who plays the young woman) in a much more realistic way as I understood what woman like her go through on a daily basis.
Word Count: 531
Amnesty . (2014). Womens Rights . Available: http://www.amnesty.org/en/womens-rights. Last accessed 1st May 2014.
Peters, J. and Wolper, A. (eds) (1995). Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. London : Routledge.
