Building a Character in a Monologue

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Does it remain possible to create six, female characters from a monologue written for a man? This is a challenge, which we took upon ourselves when working on Mark Ravenhills product. I will discuss further, how I worked through this task, when applying practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht and also Konstantin Stanislavski. When beginning to work on the text I was most apprehensive, this became evident early on in the rehearsal process, as we were challenging ourselves in creating convincing lifelike characters. An additional challenge that we came across was enabling the piece to look as though it had been written for a cast of six diverse females.
By dialogically teasing through the text, we began to create characters through the distribution of lines. Once we had all given a small number of lines, there began to be characters forming. I found that the process became a great deal easier, as the character ‘James’ is going through a thought process throughout the whole piece. “This is for the towers. This is for civilisation this is for all of us, you bastards… you don’t say that you don’t do that.” (Ravenhill, 2006, p.59) These two contradicting statements, which one character spoke, are James own thought waves. He is thinking aloud throughout, without processing what he is actually saying. Due to Mark Ravenhill writing this monologue in this way, we then are enabled to create two diverse characters from one, with ease.
Once our cast had established, who was saying which lines, we then felt that we had the beginning foundation to our character. However, we were still not any closer to creating individual characters, with their own personalities. A way in which our cast approached this task was deciding an appropriate practition...

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... anyway that you deem correct, as everyone has their own theories thus meaning that the piece is not necessarily ‘doomed to failure’.

Bibliography
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Ravenhill, M (2006). The cut and Product. London: Methuen Publishing Limited. p59-62.
Sawyer, M (2005). Think of it as Bridget Jones goes Jihad. The Guardian.
Stanislavski, K (1937). An actor Prepares. London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd. p164.
Stanislavski, K (2008). An Actor's Work. Oxon: Routledge. p154-164.
Stanislavski, K (1950). Building a Character. London: Max Reinhardt Ltd. p21.

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