Production Project Blog

Doing improvisation scenes within our characters and with other character allowed me to explore my characters with more depth. I got to understand them on a more personal level, and create scenes of what I imagine they do after their average day, and what they do as activities etc. This activity locks in with the task of creating a character playlist, because when I was imagining my character, it also reminded me of songs that I'd chosen to suit my character during certain moments in a day of their lives.
For my character 'Doctor Prokrustes', I came to the conclusion that as a doctor, she is most likely to be living much better off than the other characters during those times.I imagine that she's rich from having a good occupation. In relation to this, I imagine that a normal activity for her would be playing tennis at a club.
I imagine that my character is elegant in the way that she holds herself. Being given the role of a doctor, I imagined that she looks like me, therefore i'd be able to relate more to the character. As another task, I imagined her to look totally different to how I'd previously imagined her. Doing this I saw 'Doctor Prokrustes' with very German features (as the play was originally German), she had big curly blonde hair and blue eyes and her favorite activity was painting.
I then had to do this [painting] activity in a hot and then cold environment, and I had to physically show how these two different temperatures had an affect on my characters activity. The side affects were quite obvious as it had external effects (although my characters activity was subtle). However, I then had to focus on something within the play that could also affect this activity. I thought of the fact that the doctor had to do the unfavorable job of prescribing abortion pills for a 14 year old. This affected Doctor Prokrustes painting as she couldn't paint to a great quality like she usually would. From doing this, I could really connect to how my character would've been feeling at the time doing her job, and how it would affect her everyday life.
Later, I was partnered up with another character from the play (Martha) to improvise  a scene that shows how we interact with each other.
Overall, from doing this activity I learnt more about my character and how she'd interact with others. This has given me more of an insight on what she feels toward other character within the play, although she may not have a spoken scene with them. This work has developed my understanding of Doctor Prokrustes internal thoughts.