Faustus Rehearsal Process May 24th

Thursday 24th May 2012

We rehearsed the opening scene where the sins are first introduced, playing with the different ways in which we could say the different pieces of text that were assigned to eachothers sin. As we got into the students scene, i am the first sin to exit the stage so i got an audience view of what the scene looked like, and as assistant director i took the initiative to take over on how the scene could be improved. As i was watching it, it looked really boring and lifeless, so i made everyone do the scene again but this time really embracing the fact that we are students in the first scene and play on that, take on the charactertistics and react to eachother on stage. I told everyone to react to Faustus's reaction to eachothers work, whether it be you laugh at them, be shocked or upset by it. I made them run it again becuase i felt that the energy level needed to be raised and people were'nt reacting enough to what was going on. I tried to look at it from the audiences perspective and not as an actor and make sure there is a reason behind each action.

I have also got given the role of the pope and decided to play it as a traditional italian, taking a comedy approach to the role but with it also being quite contraversial and shocking. I think it will be interesting to see the role of the pope being portrayed by a female and how the audience will react to that. I am really excited to explore this character, seeing where greed comes into it and where its going to go from now to the day of the show. Drawing inspiration from my own family, a lot of the mannerisms and language comes from them, which helps me explore things a little more due to my own knowledge of the italian culture. We decided that the good Angel is like my servant, but i also see her as my best friend as there is some nice comedic moments between our characters. Faustus would be there in the scene, but he is invisible to me and as the food gets brought in he takes it off me and i dont know who it is. He is constantly mocking me throughout the scene and by the end he has stripped away the title i have as the pope, pouring wine all over. I think it will shock some audience members as to what is actually happening in that scene, theres comedy in it but also a pretty schocking image seeing someone make such a fool out of such a religious figure.