Previously studying Romeo and Juliet, I fell in love with the story-line and characters all over again the Nurse in particular. Her maternal instincts coupled with her sarcastic, bawdy sense of humour makes for the perfect comical character. I feel that as a young actress in training, growing and learning things about the way I'm perceived I would try something which seems like second nature. I find that I can be quite the mother hen and felt that I had the potential to put this in my performance and work this into my characterisation; the challenge would be comic timing. Comedy is not my strong suit, however, I felt that this was an opportunity to try something new.
As she has no monologue of her own, I had to go through the script and piece together bits of dialogue; this I did from Act 2 Scene 5, this is where Juliet is told that Romeo wants to marry her. After collating my monologue, I focused on learning it as quickly as possible. I did this by dividing the script up into units and objectives and then learning it with the set intentions as her emotions aren't steady and alter constantly throughout her speech.
From this I then tried the monologue in the style of pantomime to what I thought her character would be closest related to, I ensured that practising in this way I was the largest character that I could be. I then would do the exact same thing without any movement, focusing on my voice, breathing, projection and intentions. Doing this a few times I made myself more aware with where my tension was held within my body which gave the indication to move with purpose throughout my speech. Watching Baz Luhrmann's alongside the Carlo Carlei version, I saw her played in two completely ways but both still were sincere and truthful to the way in which she was written. I adapted aspects from both and incorporated one or two mannerisms into my speech.
'The Colour of Justice' is a play which is a true story and collated through actual evidence from the 'Stephen Lawrence Inquiry' that took place many years later after the murder of the young boy. This story really pulled at my heartstrings, I read many and watched these videos below:
After watching these video and shedding a few tears, I then researched the current racist killings that have been occurring around the world. The death of an American student friend of my relative sparked the fire that I needed to root myself in this monologue. One thing I've always found is I need a rooting before I can imagine certain emotions and begin to portray them; the pain and mourning that I witnessed first hand from my cousin about his friend's death was more than I could handle and I was grateful for my outlet within this monologue. The key to this one which would be challenging would be the lack of the maternal element as I wanted to play the solicitor reading Doreen's statement.
My final choice was Portia from Julius Caesar. At first I was worried that I was playing the same character with the same emotion , however, as I developed my characters for the first two and kept analysing Portia, I realised there was a very subtle difference between all characters which would be where my greatest challenge came into play.
