Development of Beached by Kevin Hood

Vocal Skills

In the character description of Maria, her dad is Italian but she has grown up in Catford which is near London and speaks with a London accent. I experimented with doing a London accent but it didn't sound realistic and I wasn't sure about how to show emotion in the voice while maintaining the accent. Most importantly the goal of this monolgue for me was to be very subtle and realilstic so that the audience can relate and feel sympathy for the character, so I decided to speak in my natural accent. In the monologue when she talks about the more personal things like when she was raped the tone is very quite, slow and with no force to hint at her vulnerability. The moments of vulnerability are very subtle because the character is has a front of being tough. Underneath she has been abused and lost her mother so showing her self being soft shocks her and she tries to block it. Also in these bit's there are long pauses to show Maria thinking and reliving the event in her head making her forget about her audience and why her wall is lowered. After these pauses and moments of vulnerability she looks to the audience and tries to laugh it off so she projects her voice with a slightly faster pace to contrast with the quite vunerable moments and kind of trying to shake off the memory. Near the end she say's "that smell, them fellas" refering to the men who raped her the pitch in her voice goes very low and she very slowly spits it through gritted teeth to show her anger at what these men did to her and to draw emphasis to these words that have a great meaning to her. On feedback it was suggested for me to make even greater contrasts between the chatty moments to when she thinks back to painful memories and talks about them. On further practice having a very big contrasts between them wasn't very believable and realistic. Another comment was that the audience did feel sympathetic so I wanted the performance to seem like it was a very real person talking about an experience that happened to them, talking to someone in confidence.

Physical Skills

The overall amount of movement in this would be very slight and subtle to draw attention to the story and the character. When I experimented with pacing it was feedback to me from piers that it was harder for them to focus on my facial expression and thus connect with the character. I decided not to use at lot of gestures as the character is quite caged in and doesn't show her emotions openly. When there are the more intimate and hard things in the monologue my first idea was that I could scrunch up my face a little to show that there is a hard emotion which she tries to hide. However the option I ended up using was to be quite animated during the rest of the monologue then when she starts to think back on hard memories she stares slightly down to the corner and her expression slowly drops to make the exposure of her vulnerability seem more accidental. At first to show her character I had my hands in my pocket to emphasis how she is emotionally closed off. Her hands are hidden in her pockets like she is trying to hide her feelings. The body language of her hands in her pockets also would give the impression that she is shy which really she is though on the outside she tries to appear tough.