mcnally99-blog

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Strengths and Weaknesses

the biggest issue that i faced throughout the whole rehearsal process was the challenge of Leon’s physicality. i believe the thing i struggle with the most as a performer is the physicality of a character. playing as a dying old man, physicality is arguably the most crucial aspect of the role as you want the audience to know that you are on death’s door, rather than thinking you have a trapped nerve in your lower back. in the early stages, i often over indulged in the physicality until i was given the note to play around with the breath/exhaustion of Leon; irregulating your breathing in a weird way changes how you move and talk. building up to an explosion then letting it deflate me. this note was followed by the direction of playing on the disparity of Leon. this worked wonders as i had much more freedom to experiment and change how i said each line. this also resulted in my choice to have Leon’s illness be Lung Cancer.

the biggest strength in the rehearsals was the relationship between Leon and Mickey. I found it very easy to click with my scene partner Chloe, given that we get along well and she is a very good actor, the chemistry came naturally and quickly. this also meant that I felt comfortable enough in the scene to incorporate traits and behaviors that my own granddad used to do in the scene.

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Character Work

When working on my character. i first used the Laban efforts in order to determine what kind of character he is movement wise. i found that Leon is a variation. he starts out the play being a punchy character (very direct in his approach), but he also has elements of slash such in the moments were he lashes out at people. this changes as his illness gets worse: he becomes more of a wring with elements of float as he is physically unable to properly get himself going anymore. using the Laban effort helped me find the character, providing a great foundation to build off.

Exercises such as hot-seating were very helpful to me as they allowed me to develop previous circumstances, as well as help me better understand the relationship between Leon and his son Lee. this helped because it allowed me to think about the relationships that Leon had outside of the script such as with his former wife. giving an explanation as to how Leon’s relationship with his wife fell apart really helped establish the remorse and regret in Leon. 

With regards to Leon’s illness, I toyed about with a couple of things but eventually i settled on lung cancer. this was because fore me,this would be the easiest and most effective method in conveying Leon’s illness to the audience as i could incorporate coughing and could use my voice and breathing more. it also meant that i could incorporate props such as an inhaler which also simultaneously provides a doing in certain scenes.

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Research

`When doing research for the play and for my role as Leon. I was helped by both my director and previous teachers. For example, one of our teachers, Mike, had experience with regards to the holdouts and showed us pictures of the street in Bootle that he lived in, as well as the house. Seeing the streets gave a lot of insight into the situation, seeing the house was especially useful to me as it gave me a clearer picture in my head of what Leon's house would look like. We also had a Q&A with one of our teachers who had performed the play taking up the role of Caravaggio, this was great because as a group, we were able to ask about all of our different characters (how they looked/acted) as well as the staging of the play. From this, we were able to figure out how to unveil the painting of the seven acts as well as get advice from a professional actor.

For the Christmas production ‘A Christmas Carol’ I used the Chubbuck technique in order to enhance my performance, specifically the first two steps: Overall Objective and Scene Objective. this was a massive help for me so i used it again attempting to implement a few more steps into rehearsals. particularly Obstacles and Doings. Obstacles are things that prevent a character from reaching their overall objective. this gives them a challenge and adds higher stakes as well as more intensity. one big obstacle with leon is the fact that he is dying. this made a big obstacle for my overall objective, but can also manifest other smallewr obstacles such as the symptoms.

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Rehearsal things

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Seven Acts Blog - Material/Process

Through reading the play for the first time the character that i was drawn to the most was Leon. 'Leon Carragher, mid seventies, A ruined castle on a hill. Once a union leader, a man of influence in the local community. Not any more. But the cantankerous forcefulness remains (pg. 31 Scene two). Reading through leon's lines I found that his character was very similar to a few members of my family, particularly my grandad. Thus Leon was my favourite character in the play and the role that I felt I would be best suited for. Compared to all of the other plays I have done in LMA, the Seven Acts of Mercy was the play that I felt the most comfortable with. This mainly due to the fact that it was set in Liverpool which meant i could use my natural accent and also i knew already about the places in liverpool such as bootle. Kirby etc… The main challenge that i was going to have would be i would be playing as a dying man in his seventies. Given that i am 20 years of age and hopefully not on death’s door, this would be the only part of the character that I believed I would struggle with.

During the auditioning process, I read up about the playwright Anders Lustgarten and watched a video that he did with the Royal Shakespeare Company  explaining the plot. Once reading the basic plot I chose the scene that i thought would be best for an audition (Act 1 Scene 2), asked one of my colleagues if they would like to do the scene with me, then using the first two steps in the Chubbuck Technique, i began to think of a basic overall objective for Leon, as well as a scene objective for the audition.