Theatre in Education (8) - Mechanicals

The mechanicals are supposed to be extremely funny, so we decided to spend this lesson working on our characters and exaggerating everything to make it more comical. We have decided to create a motif, by every time that they enter comical tuba music plays. The more physical we are with our characters, the more comical the whole scene will become. We decided to create a busy movement section to introduce our characters. We enter at different times carrying cases of costumes and props to prepare for the production. We workshopped our opening and what we could all do. I enter carrying a briefcase of costume and props, which Bottom then opens and takes things out of - he opens it so I can't see over the top, so I peek over the top and make it clear that I am struggling with the weight of the case. In the case, I have an old-fashioned phone which Ollie uses - when Lewis' character come over to speak to Bottom, Bottom just put his hand out in Quince's face. We added as many comedy moments like this in our opening scene as possible. Throughout our scenes, we have to keep this movement up. During this scene, I am taking random things out and putting them on. I have tried to make my characters as different as I can to make a contrast to show that I am multi-rolling.

For our second scene as the mechanicals, we do another movement section, but shorter than the first and slightly more organised, as the mechanicals are more confident and together as they have already had one rehearsal. We worked a lot on discovering and presenting our intentions in this scene, so we fully understood what was being said and how our characters felt about this. We worked on proxemics to show character relationships and to add comedy too. At one point, Lewis is sat DSL on a stall because he needs space - however, as each character has an idea or agrees with the idea being spoken about they move over to Quince on his stall. Quince breaks away and moves to SR, but unbeknown to him everyone else follows him. When he turns around to speak he is shocked to see us all there, gets frustrated, and moves away again, but everyone follows him again too. To add another bit of comedy, we are getting a long piece of paper to be the calendar they look at - we make a tableaux around Rob who holds the calendar up. Also, when Puck comes on everyone freezes when he speaks - this allows us to freeze in comical positions.