The Flint Street Nativity - Play, by Tim Firth (10) (Script work)

10/11/15

Today we all discussed our adult characters, reading out our adult character profiles. Not only is it important to understand our characters, but it is useful to understand other people's so we know how to interact with them better. After this, we ran half of the adult section, keeping in mind what decisions we made about our characters and what we had just learned about other characters. Whenever we had a question or were confused about a line, we would stop and go over this. We did this so we got the attitude of the line correct sooner rather than later, so we had muscle memory and so we were confident sooner. We also sorted out a lot of staging problems: where certain conversations between characters were taking place and who the conversations were between.

12/11/15

To try and learn my script I have been repeating my lines over and over again. I have read through the script every night before dinner and before bed.  Whenever I get the chance to, I will go through my lines with Lewis and we will test each other. I definitely find learning my lines easier when I am being tested by a friend, rather than reading over the lines myself.

13/11/15

Today we ran the adult scene in its entirety. We established a weakness in this section, this was page 67. We felt that this page did not run smoothly and the atmosphere didn't build enough for Mary's Mum's break down to make sense or feel real. We decided that the best thing to do was to sit down and discuss this scene. We knew that we needed to build the tension more by making this section run gradually faster and for some lines (closer to her break down) to slightly overlap. As to know when the scene needs to build, we decided to increase intensity in volume and pace after every time the line "We wish...". We decided that this would be a good line to use as it repeats a few times, so we could make the intensity build more gradually rather than in one moment. After establishing this, we decided to go through each line individually and work out the purpose of each line. Whoever's line it was would explain to the rest of the class why they thought their character was saying this and who they were saying it to. The class would then respond either in agreement or with what they thought the purpose was. We noted these points down in our scripts and then ran the scene again. We ran the scene a few times to make it flow properly and to get the build up in atmosphere sorted. We are now a lot happier with this section.