LESSON FOUR. 03|10|12. - ‘The Pillowman’

After the role play, he told us that he’d based the information he gave us on the play ‘The Pillowman’ by Martin McDonagh. He gave us the first few pages of the script which had the characters Tupolski, Ariel and Katurian. I worked with Kelly and Emily, and Matt, Ciara and Jake worked together with Chris helping to direct.
Katurian: Kelly - Matt
Tupolski: Myself - Jake
Ariel: Emily - Ciara.

My group started off my just reading the lines and then deciding where the tension built up the most and then highlighted those points so we could convey them through our delivery.  We made it so that Tupolski had a more ‘good cop’ attitude and Ariel was more violent and intimidating.
 

The play is black comedy, so we made the dark humour come through by showing a small light heartedness in ourselves so it was more noticeable as comedy but yet still felt uncomfortable to laugh with the situation. After blocking it out and adding in some contact, levels and altering our voice volumes and paces the other group performed to us and I really liked Ariel’s (Ciara’s) performance as you’d could really see her holding back her very violent side.
 

I also liked how Tupolski (Jake) and Katurian (Matt) had a really good character chemistry with how Jake intimidated Matt and how he reacted so scared and vulnerable.
 

We then performed our own and I think it went really well. We managed to pull off some lines that were difficult to interpret because the situation isn’t one that we are familiar with. So using Stanislavsky method acting we were able to put ourselves into that position and focus on the ‘what if?’
 

We are going to continue with ‘The Pillowman’ and do it as a production. I’m really excited for this and can’t wait to see how it turns out.