Jordan's-End Game evaluation

End Game

 

Endgame:  At the start of this project we had a chance to read through the script of Endgame this really helped me understand the story in more detail as I only knew the rough outline before. What I found most useful was when we split in to three groups and read through a section of the script me Cody and Jakko were in a group and we immediately started to identify characteristics and themes throughout our section of script. We started to play around with different ways in which the characters could speak and came up with our own interpretation of the script and what it means. I found this process incredibly useful as it helped me come up with ideas for the characters and also start to form my own ideas about the themes of the play.

We did several workshops to get us to start devising some material for the performance one exercise I enjoyed and felt helped with establishing the character Clov is when we tried to perform scenes whilst only being able to walk on a grid this helped me to understand how restricted Clov was as he constantly was doing everything for Hamm and even though he had the freedom of movement he was almost as stuck as Hamm. Me Cody and Jakko decided to set ourselves the goal of showing the relationship between Hamm and Clov through physical theatre this was a very useful experience as it helped me understand the relationship between the characters and there constant power struggle with each other it showed me how much they depend on each other what was interesting for me was discovering how even though Hamm and no movement in his legs he dictated the movement of most of the scenes. Through doing exercises such as the grid work and the physical theatre I gained a better knowledge of the script and also formed my own ideas on where we could take the script and how we could possibly perform the script.

We decided to discuss what themes we felt were in the script we came up with a long list then decided to pick a theme each and research into the script so we could see how the themes affects the story and see how we could use it to influence how we performed. I choose suffering as I felt all the characters had a history of suffering and continued to suffer. The thing I learnt most from my research was that even though they all suffer for me I feel that the play is about hope and how they keep going against all the odds and fight for each other. Looking back this research was a key moment in the unit for me as it changed my whole idea about the play originally I felt the play was very dark and depressing with moments of humour and after my research I felt that it was really a story of survival and how people help and need each other in equal measure.

We chose different roles for ourselves for example director, lighting, actors I really wanted to try out some directing or script writing but decided to go for an acting role as I found the characters really interesting and felt it would be great to develop my own take on one of them. I don’t regret this decision as I got the opportunity to play Nagg who was a really fun character to develop. Early on in development me and Anna improvised along to the script this was easy to do as we both came with our own interpretations of the roles and instantly found that we could add comedy to these roles rather than being dark and tragic. The early development was really important as it allowed us to inject comedy into an otherwise dark performance and allowed us to develop our characters we continued to do this in voice lessons which really helped as we found funny voices that suited our characters and the feel of the scenes we were in and worked on the physicality of feeling young but being stuck in an older body. The early improvisations helped us to change the script to suit us and we decided to have makeup to help us look ancient which helped add to the characters with young souls looking old and horrid. The development of this character really started at the early stages changing the characters from being depressed to injecting some comedy which I felt helped balance the show I’m very happy the way I managed to develop the character in such a short space of time and how me and Anna managed to develop the relationship between our characters using biscuits as the symbol of hope between us and how we managed to include that into our performance I also felt the exchanges we had between each other were not only comical but also meaningful.    

 I feel our performances went very well considering the short amount of time we had and the sudden change in casting we managed to keep a high level of energy and I feel everyone really worked well together gelling as a team to give the best performance we could. We had a limited time in in the performance space but utilised it well running the script over and over and trying out different creative ways of performing for example changing staging and lighting to best suit us.

Overall this was a really fun project to work on and I feel we worked well together to create a very creative performance that had elements of hard hitting facts and comedy I feel everyone gave a really good performance. If I was to do this project again I would work on developing my character earlier as I really enjoyed digging into it and would also try and get more time in the performance space so we could have tried out different ideas.