The York Realist

Week 1

Monday 8th January

In this lesson, we were introduced to a play called 'The York Realist' by Peter Gill. This play is about the effects that rival forces in family, class, and longing have on the love between two young men in the play.

To start of our lessons on 'The York Realist' we talked about our holidays in groups, we then had to perform one of these stories in one of these two styles: silent movie or western. This was to help us get into the mood of storytelling and also helping us to know how to keep the audience engaged and up-to-speed with what is happening on stage.  This exercise also helped us to understand other genres of acting.

 Our next exercise was to discuss a quote from the play:

I live here. I live here.

You can't see that though.

You can't see it.

This is where I live. Here.

At first, we were given the question 'what word stands out the most?'. There were four main answers that were given: 'I', 'can't', 'live' and 'here'. We were then to discuss what we think the context of this quote was. There were many answers to this question, some people took it from a political view thinking about migration. Some took it from a psychological viewpoint thinking about people living in their minds or that the place where the person lived was not physical. Our next exercise was to find a partner and devise a short piece of drama containing that quote. My partner and I thought of devising a piece of drama that portrayed the hardships of living without a home. What we did with the quote was to have the homeless person say the quote to show that 'the streets' is his home, thus adding to the character and allowing the character to elaborate on the meaning of the quote. The devised piece that I liked the most was the group who did a piece about a little boy running away to live in the forest with his imaginary friends. Not only was the piece quite comedic but the actors really developed their characters making the story more believable.

Monday 15th January

In this lesson, we ran through the scene with the different props that we had discussed on Thursday 11th January. I felt that this made the scene a lot more naturalistic even though some props weren't moved at the correct time. It also made the scene a lot easier to understand and play with. This is because our director could see where things needed to go at specific points allowing the director to make the scene more naturalistic. The props also helped the general setting feel a lot more homey because we could actually understand what was a table and what was a fireplace. Also, the way the characters interacted with the different on-scene props (e.g. tables and chairs) also helped the feel of the surroundings. 

Tuesday 16th January

To start this session we went through the scene and marked out the units of action. A unit of action is when something changes in a scene, this could be a change in time, thought process or setting. We did this to understand the script more so that we aren't just reading the script as ourselves but as the characters, this will make it easier for us to translate our characters into action (not just words). Through this exercise, we found out a lot more about the characters. For example, we found out that George and John have a lot of units of action, concerning their thought processes, which shows the awkwardness between them. Our next exercise was to make an improvisation on the scene in groups of 4/5. this was to test our understanding of the play.

Monday 29th January - Thursday 1st February

In these sessions, we got the rest of the play (scenes 2-4). We read through the scenes and picked out the most important parts so that we could come up with the themes of the play as a whole. Through doing this read through and acting out the scenes, as a class, we found out a lot more about the characters (such as the romantic tension between George and John). The themes that we picked out of reading the play were:

• Relationships (both romantic and family)
• Religion
• 'Coming out' (as in coming out of your shell)
• Acceptance
• The effects of loss
• Feeling at home

This helped us get more of an understanding of characters and the play as a whole which allowed us to have a further understanding of how we would devise a piece in response to The York Realist.

Workshops & Rehearsals

Our first workshop was at the Donmar warehouse. We started off the session with a game of 'WAH!', this was to energise the class and help our projection and focus. We then started to do an exercise where we had to stand on an imaginary line depending on if we agree or disagree with a statement. Most of these statements was based on wheather we have to move from our homrtown to gain future success. I was more on the Agree side because my area (Essex) doesn't have as many acting oppurtunities as elsewhere in England or in other places in the world, although I wasn't in full agreement. The next set of questions were asking if we would let our family decide our future. I was in the middle but more to the disagree side because I think that I should decide my own fate but since my mum birthed and parents raised me, they will help me go about looking to my future and can say what they want for me, but I should get the choice to accept it or not. In the next exercise we had to imagine that the floor was a map of the world. at firts we had to stand where we live, we then had to stand where our parents lived and after that stand where we want to live. Some people stayed in the same place, but i traveled around alot, I went from east London to Nigeria to washington D.C. After this we were asked why we want to live in thoes places. I answered I want to live in washington D.C because of the education in theatre and film so that I can go on to be the best actor I can be. After the session finished we were given the task of writing a 30 second piece about where we most feel safe. We then began to work on these in rehearsals, here are some clips of two of the scenes:

Georgina's - her old house

Ilonka's - her walks

My safe place scene was about my early morning run, I talked about how running takes my mind off all the bad things that came the previous day and how it puts me at ease for the day ahead. I feel like sharing these storyies with an audience made it more worth while because even if we are acting in a non-naturalistic way we can still put our feelings into our movement which adds to the overall feel of the piece.