Our Country's Good:
As someone who had no prior knowledge of this play, I had some quite extensive research to do in terms of understanding not only what it is about basely, but also in understanding the more complex sides of the play such as its themes, sub-textural qualities and historical context.
We were provided with a lot of sources of information about the play to look at, which helped me greatly in my exploration of this play. I have listed my sources of research at the bottom of this post.
This is some of the information about the play which has helped me develop my own interpretation and understanding of the scene we have been working on.
Our Country's Good is a play by Timberlake Wertenbaker, which is based on real events and set in the 1700s. The play explores the story of the people who were on the British Prison ships which deported convicts to Australia, and the different things that happen to them, including them all putting on a play.
This which features heavily the themes of oppression and freedom, crime and punishment, justice and mercy, and quite predominantly, levels of "authority".
Actually, there is a very interesting social dynamic in this play because of the way it centres around the different levels of authority, and even levels of class. Although the characters in the play are quite set apart by constructs such as these, some of them being convicts, some of them Captains and lieutenants, they all still find themselves mixed up in a mess of relationships which ultimately go against the boundaries put in place by their different "titles", if you like.
For me as an actor, I find it fun to play about with themes such as these social constructs, as for me personally, it adds a lot of texture to my interpretation of the role I play. I also find it quite thrilling that this play explores the value of theatre, using the construct of a "play within a play", and this is another aspect of Wertenbaker's work which I find compelling.
The Stanislavski theories we have been looking at so far:
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| Constantin Stanislavski |
- Given Circumstances: The facts you have about your character and the rest of the play, literally the circumstances in which everything is happening within the play.
- Emotional recall: Searching your own past for emotional triggers and sensations which can help to bring your character to life for you. .
- Through line: All the different aspects of your character's role and life, including everything that happens to them/that they do offstage.
- Objectives: What your character is trying to achieve, what their goal is, what do they want or what are they trying to do?
- Magic if: What would I do if I was in this situation?
- Actions: Quite simply how you achieve what you are trying to do.
- Circles of Attention: Your awareness of the world around you, which starts with you onstage, and builds outwards.
- Subtext: The real meaning beneath the words in the text, the actual motivation behind what the character is saying.
Applying these theories to our work:
So, after we were taught about the different theories, we were taught how to apply them to the work we are doing in class, and especially how to use and develop our own interpretation of these theories in the scenes we are doing from Our Country's Good.
The theories have shown me new ways to break down my personal barriers and new ways to work on pieces of drama, as I'm going to explore below!
The theories have shown me new ways to break down my personal barriers and new ways to work on pieces of drama, as I'm going to explore below!
Over the weeks we have been rehearsing our pieces, we've put these different theories into practise in numerous exercises, which I have found very helpful for developing my role in the play, Mary Brenham.
For example, we did one exercise which worked on the concept of emotional recall:
We sat with our eyes closed and were told to imagine as vividly as we could different senses; a pleasant smell and an unpleasant smell, a nice sight and a bad sight, something nice to touch and something not nice to touch. a positive sound and a negative sound, and a taste we like and a taste we don't. We had to think about how imagining these different sensations and using our own triggers to convey our emotions could help us in our scenes. I found this helped me a lot personally, because it can be easy for acting to look stunted if you are unable to empathise with the feelings of your character, and if you can use emotional recall onstage, it could be much more convincing and honest.
We looked at our objectives and actions in the scenes from pretty much the first moment we were given our scripts.
I am in a group with Katy and Elvina. The three of us spent some time analysing our scene together, annotating our script and discussing what we believe our characters were trying to achieve and how they were going about achieving it.For example, we did one exercise which worked on the concept of emotional recall:
We sat with our eyes closed and were told to imagine as vividly as we could different senses; a pleasant smell and an unpleasant smell, a nice sight and a bad sight, something nice to touch and something not nice to touch. a positive sound and a negative sound, and a taste we like and a taste we don't. We had to think about how imagining these different sensations and using our own triggers to convey our emotions could help us in our scenes. I found this helped me a lot personally, because it can be easy for acting to look stunted if you are unable to empathise with the feelings of your character, and if you can use emotional recall onstage, it could be much more convincing and honest.
We looked at our objectives and actions in the scenes from pretty much the first moment we were given our scripts.
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| Laura Dos Santos as Mary Brenham and Helen Bradbury as Dabby Byrant in Octagon Theatre Bolton and Out Of Joint's "Our Country's Good", 2012. Photo by Robert Workman |
My character Mary's objective in the scene is to get everyone to learn the lines for the play they are in, but she also wants desperately to keep the peace between Liz and Dabby, who are constantly bickering and fighting.
I wrote underneath each of my lines an action, which all put together would ultimately make Mary's objective clear. For example, every time Liz makes an advance on Dabby, or Dabby tries to provoke Liz, I pull them apart, or perhaps shoot Dabby a look to signal she should stop.
My character is somewhat caught inbetween the other two in the scene, and I found that quite fun to play around with.
An exercise we did a few weeks ago really helped me to develop my understanding of the subtext in our scene, particularly in regard to the position that my character is in.
In our groups, we were given about fifteen minutes to improvise a scene which could happen prior to the actual scene we are working on from the play.
Katy, Elvina and I thought it would be productive for us to do a scene which centres around a similar social situation to the one in our piece. So, we decided that we would focus on the friction between Liz and Dabby, and the way that Mary is stuck in between them, trying her hardest to prevent arguments and bad feeling.
I actually thought the process of making up our own scene between the characters did immense good for me in thinking in a more in-depth way about how Mary feels, and why her objective is what it is.
Putting things into my own words and looking at an interpretation of a role which is more relatable to me made our scene much more accessible to me.
To further add to the clarity of the relationships between the three women, there is an actual physical fight in our scene. This was great to work on, and we spent one session choreographing it to precision so that it would run smoothly in the flow of the scene.
As you can see clearly, a lot of Stanislavski's techniques were exceptionally interesting for me and helped me a lot, although I didn't find that I could apply some to my work as easily as others.
Something we are constantly told by Rob is to not "throw the baby out with the bath water", and I think this definitely applies here. The Stanislavski theories we have explored have given me a great insight into my own development as an actor, and my role in Our Country's Good, and I'll no doubt find myself using these techniques on numerous occasions in the future.
Further work on our scene:
As well as exploring Stanislavski's techniques and using them in our piece, there was additional work to be done on improving the cohesion of our scene.
As much as we can rehearse in our group, there's only so much we can see from being onstage, and it's also important to hear what it looks like to an audience. This is one of the reasons I like the way our drama class give feedback to one another, and try to be as constructive as possible in our critiquing.
Over the course of our rehearsals, we received a lot of feedback from our peers.
Some of the feedback I was given personally was this:
- Good physicality
- Good diction
- Work on projection
- Add more "oomph" or sass to role
- Good at staying grounded
- Work on emotions and facial expressions
- Put more energy into it
- Perhaps play Mary a bit more annoying
Tips like this were really good to keep in mind when trying to improve my portrayal of Mary.
Altogether, a combination of Stanislavski techniques, research into "Our Country's Good", and a lot of rehearsing, has come together to give me a well rounded understanding of the work that we have been doing for this last assignment.
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