MONOLOGUES

Monologues

For this assignment we were asked to research and find 2 monologues one classical (Shakespeare) and a contemporary (modern). I had found a contemporary monologue from one of the plays I had studied already which was "Find me by Owen Wymark" this play is about a family and how they coped with their daughter Verity. The play follows the life of verity from when she was young to how she is now. The girl in the play has a mental health condition and this play presents how her and her family cope with said condition. The play is structured in an episodic manner. I chose this play because it represents the struggles of a family who have a daughter with mental health problems and I really like the way that its structured. The monologue that I chose was about how her brother Mark deals with Verity and how he feels. Mark is Verity's older brother but at that moment in the play he is still very young so I decided to present this character as a child complaining about everything. The monologue is structured in an order that explains how he feels towards Verity; this also shows how he's feeling about his family. I decided to make Mark feel left out by being angry at the audience as speaks, I did this because I wanted to make it seem as if he's bothered by the fact that Verity has his parents’ full attention and he feels annoyed at her which explains why he says what he says. I also made the decision to say Marks lines in a mocking way whenever he repeats what Verity says, this is because it represents how he's childish and he doesn't like Verity that much. For my classical, Shakespearean monologue I wanted to choose something completely different, I decided to go with one of my favourite plays by Shakespeare which was A Midsummer Night's Dream. There are so many reasons why I chose to do this play but one of them was because the genre of the play is comedy which is different compared to Find Me which is serious and a drama. The play Midsummer Night's Dream portrays the themes of love, obsession, jealousy and magic which compared to Find Me is different as one is fiction and the other non-fiction. The monologue that I chose was Bottom’s speech in Act 5 Scene 1, at this point in the play the mechanicals who are part of the three groups within the play are performing as a celebration for the Duke and his new wife Hippolyta, the play within the play is about Pyramus and Thisbe a tragedy drama that instead becomes presented as humorous and hysterical due to the actors (one of them being the character Bottom) performing terribly that even the Hippolyta quotes “ Beshrew my heart but I pity the man”. I decided to choose this monologue because it was different to the character of Mark in Find Me as Bottom is a Middle aged man who make the audience laugh due to his ‘awful and bad’ acting. This gave me ideas on how to perform this, I began my research on the internet watching performances on Bottom’s/Pyramus’ speech. I saw that past actors had performed it drunk, dumb or even just stupidly, so I gathered the information and decided to create my performance as just being over the top and very dramatic which worked effectively as my target to make my audience laugh worked.

Through-out the week we had sessions where we would rehearse the monologue in front of everyone in class so that they would give us feedback on what we did right and what we could improve on. I was sort of afraid of performing because I choose to perform my classical monologue which was Bottom's/Pyramus' Speech from Act 5 Scene 1. I performed as I planned however I got muddled up on some of the words nevertheless it worked in my favour as people thought that it was part of how I planned it, being truthful to myself I knew that I still had to work on my lines and make sure that I knew the speech although confusing myself gave me the idea of jumbling my lines on purpose to show that I'm a horrible actor which is what I was going for and wanted to do. The feedback that I got really helped me out and made me more confident in myself. Everyone said that they understood the piece clearly and that I shouldn't change it as it presented an 'over the top' dramatic and bad actor.
Our assignment was to get the monologue recorded so that's what we did. On the day of recording I was extremely nervous as the person who was going to record us was very professional and I didn't want to mess up in front of him. We took a trip to the Westminster Kingsway college in Soho where we met the camera man. We took in turns recording as there wasn't a lot of space for everyone to be there as an audience. When it was my turn to record I was in the recording room with Daniella and Teigan they made me nervous as I didn't know I had a small audience yet they were very helpful and supportive. As I observed their recordings I saw that they were also nervous and which made me feel better as I wasn't the only one with nerves but we all supported each other and made each other feel better. The difficulty when I had mine recorded was that you couldn't move and you had to look directly at the camera as if it was the audience, this was hard for me as I didn't prepare for it however I performed it as I had to. It took quite a few takes but I still completed my performance.

The end result wasn't as bad as I'd hoped it to be, I observed myself to take notes on what I did well and what I could do to improve further. I thought that I had good eye line, voice and somewhat emotion, but I thought I could improve on posture and stop moving a lot. In addition, I also believed that I should have done a different monologue which was serious like perhaps my contemporary monologue suited this recording better. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTnkOmC0aY&list=PLX1pQEuh-Ydm80rZOSB45GvOvGFZZssfk&index=11&t=0s