Today we did our Restoration era. Dan chose the comedy play "The Man of Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter" by George Etherge. He told us who he wanted to play each role and then we did a read through. Below are the roles, who played them and reasons for this:
- Harriet = Toby (a convention of restoration theatre is for men to play women. Toby is the shortest out of the boys)
- Young Bellair = Lorna (another convention is for women to play men. Harriet and Young Bellair are due to be married, so having both of these characters being shorter shows that they are younger than the other characters)
- Dorimant = Tom (taller so shows he is wise - he has a slightly higher status. Very serious)
- Lady Woodvil = Lewis (this character is Harriet's mother. Having Lewis as this role fits the convention of men playing women. Lewis can alter his voice to sound very exaggerated and over the top)
- Busy = Ashley (this character is Lady Woodvil's butler. Ashley suited the role)
Dan wanted us all to act quite melodramatic (to fit the Restoration theatre conventions) but when our characters don't understand something so the other character rephrases their sentence Dan wanted us to drop the melodramatic approach and be very natural (for example, Toby's line "She'll think I'm being a bitch, you won't even get blamed"). My character, Young Bellair, seemed to be fairly fed up with their life at the moment - judging from this scene alone, as I do not know the play and wasn't able to research it as we filmed the scene in this lesson - as they do not seem to want to marry the partner their father has intended for him (or at least this is how I interpreted it).If we were to do this scene again and if we had more time, we could have learned our lines so we didn't have scripts in our hands which restrict our movement. We could also have included costumes to show the era of the piece better. By having the traditional costumes would also form a large contrast to when our characters are more naturalistic at times (for example when Toby explains what he means to my character, and also my walk off at the end).
