Choosing appropriate material; Duologue

For my duologue I am working with Gemma Kaye, an actress whom I have worked well with in my most recent performances.
Rivals - Acres and Sir Lucius O Trigger
Saved - Harry and Mary

We decided that we wanted to look into a performance of a couple as we felt we were both better actors in our performance in Saved.
Using both of our strengths and personal interests we finally came down to three options;


 John Osborne – Look Back in Anger 
Stephen Berkoff – Decadence
Patrick Marber – Closer


We felt that these looked at my styles of interest - Naturalistic and Berkoff and my strengths facial expressions, exaggerated gestures, emotive characters and accents.

John Osborne – Look Back in Anger

            Look Back in Anger, is a play that is well known for being ‘kitchen sink realism’ which is a form of social realism of the 1950s to early 1960s. We were looking at Act 1 of the play;

‘As Act 1 progresses, Jimmy becomes more and more vituperative, transferring his contempt for Alison's family onto her personally, calling her "pusillanimous" and generally belittling her to Cliff. It's possible to play this scene as though Jimmy thinks it's all a joke, but most actors opt for playing it as though he really is excoriating her. The tirade ends with some physical horseplay, resulting in the ironing board overturning and Alison's arm getting a burn. Jimmy exits to play his trumpet off stage’

            We think that this scene has similar intentions to that of Edward Bond in Saved (the play me and Gemma have worked on together before), therefore we will be able to understand the concept better as we have the knowledge of from Saved. The difference between Saved and Look Back in Anger is that the characters are more upper class creating a different feel of how to build tension within the piece.

We decided against choosing this piece for our duologue because we felt it was too similar to Saved. Even though we should play to our strengths we felt that this would be almost repeating the same scene with different characters would lead us to have no motivation and not perform the piece to the best of our abilities.

Stephen Berkoff - Decadance

           Decadance as much of all of Berkoff's work expresses the style of 'total theatre' where the actor-audience relationship is immediate, this also showcases his expressionist techniques.

We were looking at the first scene between Steve and Helen.

'This scene shows Helen on a white leather sofa talking firs to the audience and then with Steve, Steve remains frozen in this first monologue apart from to light Helen's cigarette these are mimed as to extract the greatest amount of absurdity to the physical response. Acting should be sensual, erotic and flamboyant'

         We liked the characters with in this piece as they are characters that had a lot of depth to them and this would allow us to be able to play them with more understanding.

We decided against choosing this piece for our duologue because we felt that because Gemma had not previously performed Berkoff she would feel out of her comfort zone and this would be seen as a challenge and as something new to try.

Patrick Marber - Closer

           Closer is a play thats Characters are heavily influenced by Konstantin Stanislavski by having very naturalistic characters. We looked at Larry and Anna's break up scene.

         

             These characters are again in the same situation as that of Saved and Look Back in Anger yet the context is totally different. These characters are much what we liked from the Decadence that they are nitty gritty.

We decided on choosing this duologue because it shows a style that I have interest in (naturalism) it also showcases my strengths which are emotive characters and accents. This is also a similar set up to previous performances therefore we will be able to build upon our those performances.