SCENE ELEVEN REHEARSAL

Hamlet embarrasses Laertes and Polonius 

This week we worked on scene 11 with Simeon and Callum. Stuart said that this scene was exceptionally important as it is the only scene that contained some light hearted humour, which is critical to not make the audience too tense.

In our rehearsal, Simeon and I weren't feeling a connection between each other. Hamlet had just made a mockery out of Claudius by embarrassing him at the game, so Hamlet is high on life happy. Leartes enters to meet Hamlet, but Hamlet sees this as an opportunity to embarrass Laertes as he knows he has the upper hand in this situation.

Simeon and myself felt that there wasn't enough tension between us, so we played around with how to say lines and how to play the characters physically. Originally, I was very stiff and uptight, almost pompous and Simeon was loose and comfortable. In the end we flipped this, Hamlet was loose and nimble since he's happy and Laertes is stiff and uptight because he's embarrassed. This change made our physical relationship to each other more natural and real; genuine. This also, in turn, flipped how we delivered our lines. I became more fluent with my vocal range, not being afraid of searing off into weirder registers whereas Simeon maintained that stiffened, closed fist of a voice - to retain Laertes' anger. This left the scene feeling human and truthful.

One thing I noticed from last weeks rehearsals is that my voice isn't strong enough to project across the new theatre. My lung capacity because of my Asthma has made it hard to project. This meant that I struggled a lot when finding the breath control to deliver the monologue. To work around this, for the past week I have been focusing solely on my lung capacity, going over and over the monologue with my dad as the audience, but at different distances. This week, after all the hard work, I can say that I am proud of how far my lung capacity has come. For the first time I felt as though that wasn't the weak point in my performance.

Another thing I had difficulty was my characters journey throughout the space. I would just sort of enter, then exit with no clear path or motive. To stop this I actioned my script with objectives and physical objectives. I set the objectives of the scene into three stages.

Attract - When I first enter, Hamlet wants to get close to Laertes to embarrass him. 

Detract - When Hamlet turns on Laertes at his refusal, Hamlet forces Laertes to detract himself away.

Retract - After turning on Laertes, Hamlet because more introverted, yet still embarrassed Laertes.