Evaluation of duologue

Thursday 15^th June

Today was the day of the UCAN performance. The doors for the show opened at 7pm at which time the audience started waiting to see the performance.

Before the show, each of the cast members were performing a duologue downstairs in the foyer of the Chapel arts centre. Over the past few months, Angel and I have been learning and developing our duologue and tonight we were performing it. Everyone else in the group was performing a monologue.

The duologue that we were performing is called ‘Split down the middle’ and is about 2 friends who are on a works outing. They are on a boat out at sea when suddenly things start to go wrong when one of the characters realises that the boat is leaking. The duologue involves 2 characters who are both very contrasting. Josie is overdramatic and believes that both of the characters are going to die however Fran is the opposite. She is not worried about the boat leaking and is a bit dumb whilst trying to cheer up Josie.

The day before the performance, I spoke to my lecturer and she said that there was going to be a slight change of plan. The original plan was to perform the piece on the stair landing, however the lighting and sound quality wasn’t very good in this position so we have decided to set up the boat in an area in the foyer. Because we now have more space, the art teacher Jo is making us a screen to go behind the boat. This will give more of a sense that we are in a boat, out at sea.

During the day before the show, we had a full dress and tech rehearsal of the show. This meant that we got to practice our duologue downstairs and planned how we were going to enter and exit. We came up with the idea to come round the back of the audience instead of walking through them because this means that we will be able to stay in character better. The rehearsal didn’t go as well as planned as we kept messing up our lines.

Out of all of the monologues and duologues, mine and Angel’s was first. I felt really nervous to start this off because I had to start the duologue. By having the opening line it meant that I had to get everyone’s attention with my first line which was “HOOT, HOOT, HOOT!!” I was also nervous because this is a comedy piece and I have never performed a comedy piece before. We haven’t performed this in front of anyone apart from my peers within my performing arts sessions.  Here is a video of Angel and I performing the duologue:

Evaluation:

A strength of the performance was that I managed to get everyone’s attention at the start of the piece. I was very nervous about doing this because I wasn’t able to practice shouting over a large group of people. Therefore I just had to go for it on the night and hope that I got everyone’s attention. When I did my first “HOOT” I didn’t quite manage to get all attention but by the second and last “HOOT” everyone was looking and listening to me. I was very pleased that I got all attention as I didn’t think that I could do this. By getting attention from all the audience members meant that they could all engage in the piece.

Another strength of the performance is that I managed to remember all of my lines. I was worried in rehearsals as I did mess up some of my lines within the dress rehearsal so I thought that I might mess them again in the final performance.

Another strength is that we managed to make the audience laugh. Only recently have I started to realise the comedy within the piece. This may be because I have mostly been focusing on learning the lines and not focusing on the expression and context of the lines.

I also feel like I managed to portray my character quite well. I have done some research outside of lecture time but I unfortunately couldn’t find much information on the piece. This meant that I had to make my own interpretation of the character alongside help from my lecturer Cara.

A weakness of the performance is that there were a few lines that Angel forgot. This meant that it stopped the flow of the piece slightly. However I did manage to cover up this issue because I whispered the line to her. I had learnt mostly all of the script and this came in very useful when something went slightly wrong.

Working on this duologue has made me realise that working with only one other person can be quite difficult. It makes it very difficult to learn and rehearse line if the other person does not work at the same pace as you. I encountered this situation quite a few times. There were several different occasions where I had learnt most of my lines but because I didn’t have the correct cue line present, it meant that I wasn’t able to remember my line and then go on to deliver it.

In contrast, working with only one other person on a piece of drama did mean that it was easier to meet up outside of lecture time and practice over the lines. It didn’t mean that we had to get a whole group of people together to rehearse the lines. This meant that we were able to rehearse quite a lot outside of lecture time when we were both free.