Anton Chekhov; The Cherry Orchard

Rehearsal Blog 1

In weak 1 I was given the script for The Cherry Orchard. After reading through and getting idea of some of the characters, I was chosen to be Alexander in part 1. At first, it seemed very daunting as the synopsis of this character was "business man" and this part had a few large monologues. But after the read through I gained more of an idea of my character and the plot of the play which allowed me understand the research I need to do to develop my character fully and achieve the unit objectives such as performing Chekhov in a naturalistic way. My research is recorded below.

Finding Character

I was told my character was a business man. With this I had a hard time understanding at first, how I should act this as this was very vague. So in the first rehearsal, I feel this caused me to be unhappy about my character and not want to act. This lead to a poor first rehearsal for me. This lead to Karen as the director to have to lead me in the right direction and work with me on my character. An example of this is the line "this is them". Where my pronunciation of the word "them" was incorrect due to the lack of motivation I had. I managed to improve on my voice thorough the rehearsals and speak in a way my character might. Due to the improvement, my motivation increased for the play and I found that I became my character more and acted in a more naturalistic way.

Another situation like the one above was from the first line; "Thank god, what time is it?". I understood that my character had only just woken up. At first I just said the line without any energy and it was bland and dry. But in this first rehearsal I didn't really experiment with different energies and therefore my acting wasn't good. I feel this means I didn't reach a naturalistic performance and am disappointed in myself for that rehearsal for not using what I have learnt to develop my character; such as: using Stanislavski's "The System" and blocking the scripts and finding new thoughts and also for not being imaginative. So this was a weakness for me in the first rehearsal and to improve I would need to have used these techniques to find truth in my character to achieve the objective of naturalism.