Although it may not have looked like it, from the selection that we eventually decided on for our performance, each and every character that we chose to portray in our performance piece was picked for a specific reason. With each scene that we created, we crafted an entirely new performance, with no two characters being the same. We wanted to play around with some differentiating scenarios and styles of performance too. For example; we had one scene in which a terrified foreigner laments about the safety of his family, and how he fears for his siblings as the bombs in his country fell, alongside the character of Mr Mayonnaise, a light hearted gimmicky character, who spoke in a singsong voice and spoon fed the foreigner mayonnaise. While this may just seem like nonsense, we picked those two characters to show the contrast within a true to our world character, like that of the foreigner, and that of Mr Mayonnaise, who is entirely an absurdist creation.
We set out, months ago when we first began to craft our performance, with the intention of simply entertaining people. We had written a list of rules for what it was exactly we wanted our performance to be. We wanted it to be fun, without stressing when making it. We wanted people to be engaged and entertained by it. So we started to consider during rehearsals what would be ‘fun’ for us to perform. And we managed to come up with a list of about sixty to seventy characters that we thought would be entertaining to act out.
Of course, like any piece of performance, ours developed from this massive list of characters to a set list of thirty characters. Fifteen for myself, and fifteen for my partner. As we had gone through the process of rehearsals, we realised that it would be more engaging for us as performers and for the audience, if we didn’t just constantly perform stuff we thought was humorous or entertaining. If we were to truly be engaging, we had to have a nice mix of styles in our performance, and perform it with the intention of ‘ghosting’. We hoped that audiences would be able to relate to these characters, and this changed the performance altogether. And so we incorporated characters such as ‘A man on the brink of suicide’ and ‘an anti-Semitic headmaster’ into our piece. We tried to cover as many bases of relatability as we possibly could, even if they weren’t all positive aspects.
Cutting certain characters was a hard decision to make. We had spent a good time choosing this list of sixty to seventy characters that we agreed would be entertaining to perform, and by the time we had performed, there were probably only fifteen of these characters left from the original list. However, that was not a bad thing, and the decision was the right one to make. Where we could have included some characters, we feel as performers that the ones we did pick were exactly the right choice.
Sorry Romeo. Sorry starving artist. Maybe next time.
