Medea Evaluation

 

 

In this post I am going to evaluate our performance of Medea.

 

We did 3 performances, one on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

 

I played 2 characters in the performance, a child and a messenger.

 

 

Character: Child

 

The children in the story belong to Jason and Medea. They are what causes disagreements between the couple and in the end are killed by the Medea. The story goes through Medea's life as she is struggling to decide what to do to the children. The 6 chorus cast members are the ones who try to convince her that killing them is a foolish thing to do. The children are very happy, easy going children.

 

As this was a Greek theatre performance it was decided that the idea of the children wearing masks would be very effective and would also work well with the fact we have kept the staging and layout very in the Greek period but the story and acting is sometimes very modern.

 

What I enjoyed most about playing a child was having the chance to wear a mask and learn and develop a totally new skill. Before Medea I had never worn a mask for a show so I had a lot to learn but have loved the experience. I have learnt all about the rules of wearing a mask and these were things I had no idea about before. For a career in the theatre and performing industry you need to have as many skills and experiences as possible and after wearing a mask in Medea I would love the chance to develop another character that wears a mask.

Me and Sarah worked very hard on making the character humerous. We worked on choosing specific sections of speech by other characters and working on how we can react. The section in which Medea is taking the children away from Jason we are positioned next to Jason with Medea infront with her back to us. Jason says 'your going to grow up into big men, like my brothers'. At this point Jason punches me in a joke way but not realising how hard he does it I stumble because of it. This is humerous for the audience to watch and also gives us a chance to get our character more across.

 

 

Character : Messenger  

 

 The messenger's in this story are the ones who deliver the news of the Princess and Creons death. They are quite excited by what they have seen and are loving telling this gory story. They dress smart, skirt, shirt and blazer.

 

What I enjoyed most about playing a messenger was the fact that while we spoke and explained the story the chorus acted it out. They were downstage nearer the audience and each took a character and acted exactly what we said. It made it humerous and also ensured the audience understood what we were saying.

 

 What I struggled with the most was making the story sound believable. I needed to make the audience think I had actually seen this massive moment and that im saying it from memory and picturing what I see. To help with doing this Sarah and I worked closely with the chorus and Adrian and did a task to make this better. We went through our speech and everytime the others didnt feel what we was saying was believeable they would say 'We dont believe you'. This made us annoyed and also more wanting to get into the character. It made us shout and really fight to get heard and so they would believe us. Another technique Adrian tried with us was the character we was trying to talk to, Medea, she would walk away while talking to her so we end up chasing her and having to force our story at her.