Faustus Rehearsal Process May 11th

Thursday 11th may 2012

The sin i have taken the role of is greed. I am very happy with that particular role as i feel greed has so many layers to it, and can be played in so many different ways. I don't want it to be just a one dimensional aspect of a character. I think this particular sin can really challenge me as an actor where i have the freedom and creative control to transform and mould it into something totally original and my own. Greed can have the desire for anything not just one thing, it can be for money, food, sex,love, power, therefore theres a different approach and characterisation for each and different mannerisms to indicate what possession they want.

I am playing the character of Valdes, we decided as a group that we wanted to make the characters of Valdes  and Cornelius who is played by Rosie to be funny and break up the tone of the play. At first Cornelius was played by Chris, who's sin was sloth and we were cleaners. But when we rehearsed it we realised that the idea of them being cleaners didn't work as they both were upper class and well spoken so we changed the job roles and related them to the language and played with the idea of them being the principal and superintendent of the university. But once we'd ran through it that idea didn't work either. We came to the decision to change sloth for envy as we thought envy and greed together would be a better fit. Once Rosie and i read it through together we all agreed that it worked better and the ideas came from there. After discussing all the different ways in which our characters link with Faustus we went ahead with the idea of them being co workers. I was greedy for Faustus's books and all of his knowledge whereas Rosie was very envious of the relationship between Valdes and faustus but also wants to be like my character and have that same relationship with Faustus even though she is also jealous of him as well.

Once Ellie had seen what we had came up with she liked the idea of the relationships between the characters and the little characteristics of each sin but that we needed to just expand on them more and think outside the box. We had 3 chairs on stage but we didn't think about where the chains had come from and how they would get there after the previous scene.  Also that you don't realise until you have an outside perspective how boring and outdated having chairs and table on stage is. I wouldn't want to watch a piece where people sit down in the entire scene so why would i do that myself. This really helped me realise that i need to think more creatively about how to portray a scene and that it's not just entirely about the text, but the delivery in terms of characterisation and the use of levels, the story will tell itself.