N2C - Initial Rehearsal

Thursday 29th September

In this session of N2C we were introduced to our director and the play we would be exploring. The cast I am part of will be looking at the play 'Purple' by Jon Fosse. It is a simple story of a group of teenagers who are in a band and rehearse in a cellar under a disused factory - but it focuses on the relationships between them all and the complex array of emotions teenagers experience at this stage of their lives.

We were given our roles in this session (though only 3 of the 5 in our cast were there) and began considering the characters and their given circumstances, ie what their backgrounds were and what they would be feeling or thinking about during the play. The three main characters are "The Girl", "The Boy" and "The Drummer" - we talked about how each of these characters represents a core emotion in a way, the Girl being promiscuity, the Boy being pain/sadness and the Drummer being anger/violence. By acknowledging these key traits in each of the characters we can adapt the way we interact with each other and how we respond to different situations on stage - for my character (the Girl) she is in a transitional stage from moving on from a relationship with the Drummer and might be beginning a relationship with the boy, and I think this would stir up a range of emotions between the three of them: the Girl might feel guilty about leaving the Drummer and leading the Boy on, or he could feel guilty for 'stealing' the Drummer's girlfriend; there would be jealousy between the Boy and the Drummer who both want to be with the Girl; and also anger from the two of them, directed at each other but also towards the Girl, and all this would be building inside each of the characters throughout the play before it is released in some way, most likely towards the end of the play. When this is combined with the confused feelings the Boy has about his family life and the loss of his grandmother, the one family member he really loved and cared about, all these emotions become more intense and confusing for him in particular.

Fosse describes the characters in his play as "more like fields of emotion and entities which are connected to one another" which is also shown in him not naming his characters and using limited dialogue. This detachment is challenging as an actor since the lines don't openly convey the thoughts or feelings of the characters and (at least for the first few pages of the script that we were given) are fairly simplistic, but it does allow for opportunities to use silences and body language to convey meaning, and I think it could be very effective in showing different tensions between the characters.