Looking back over our time in the cage.

Within Retold theatre I had two roles, therefore must look back over the process of both to show my opinion of the success.

From a marketing point of view I was pleased with the feedback and response we got from our posters and flyers. I overheard many conversations where the theatre companies were being discussed and ours was frequently described by the posters “that one with all the eyes” and people knew which performance were speaking about from the description of our posters. People have commented on how interesting and intriguing our performance looked from our marketing approach, which was exactly our intention.

From the point of view of an actor, I always am of the mind that performance can have always have gone better, and there is never a place where improvements cannot be made. However, having said this I feel that the final show was the best performance of Cagebirds that we had ever done. The energy was the highest it had been, as was the focus. I think part of the reason for this was the introduction of the audience, and knowing it was our last show – but also the fact that we were improving with every time we worked on the piece.

Personally I feel my character developed greatly in the last few weeks, there were certain changes that opened up doors for my character and this then allowed me to experiment more with my character, such as the idea of making my character have a bit of a God complex, and make them self important, and truly believe that they can help and cure the other birds of their vices.  The more human attributes, and more logical thinking pattern of my character meant that I was able to understand the motives and needs of my character a lot more clearly, and realising the revolutionary stance of the character and making parallels with real world examples of this behaviour. I spent a lot of time watching speeches online and taking inspiration from many different places:

This video, although from a film, shows the quiet passion and depiction of power through using quieter tones and the change in emotion without the change in volume. I tried to emulate the same intense passion that this character has, for my character in reference to freedom and escaping the cage.

This speech however, shows the more loud and excited passion for freedom. Within the second video clip however the audience react to his speech giving him more buzz and support and confidence in what he saying, whereas within Cagebirds, the fact the birds are ignoring my attempts to widen their mind means sometimes it was hard to reach such a level at the beginning, but by the end of the process I felt like I had managed to combine the two approaches to make a convincing revolutionary influence within the cage.

I think personally my performance improved greatly as the rehearsals went on and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring my character, the play and the allegorical context of the performance. I was proud of the end result on performance day and hope that the audience enjoyed the show, and enjoyed reading these posts from our company!