GRIEF. THE PLAY

GRIEF. THE PLAY

GRIEF. THE PLAY

GRIEF. THE PLAY

This semester we presented the play Grief by playwright and script-writer David Kantounas.

He was born in London and studied at the University of West England. Kantounas trained at the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers Programme and in 2010 he was selected by the Old Vic New Voices as one of the best young writers in the UK (David Kantounas, 2022).

The play Grief is about a twenty-seven-year-old man living in London who one day has a breakdown after seeing the picture of a young beautiful actress, who committed suicide, splashed on the main page of a newspaper. Suddenly his life takes a turn and those around him are also affected by it. In this play the writer touches on different topics: From suicide to social media, life in big cities, relationship in between partners and co-workers, grief, death, mental wellness and families.

Our teacher, Ed Hughes, decided that all of us should play the main character Pete along with a second character. It was a challenge for us as actors to play two characters in the same play.

It was both exciting and interesting to see how all of us were playing Pete. We all portrayed the diverse faces of Pete to the public. During the first few weeks of our readings we analysed the script and found the stage directions as well as the different sets and props required in each scene. We also analysed the relationships between the characters, the facts, determined the objectives of the characters in each scene, asked questions about the characters, found the beats in the script and analysed the text (the repetition of certain words, the pace, the language used).

Grief is a modern play and it was fascinating to come across one written in a language you could relate to, as the language used in the play is very similar to the one I use in my everyday life. The pace of the play was quick, with short sentences and lines, very similar to how Mr Kantounas speaks. The obstacle I found, because the pace was quick, was to play my characters and to not to leave spaces of silence in between my partner’s lines and mine.

Despite being a modern script, the quick pace of the play reminded me of the ‘shared lines’ often found in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. Understanding ‘shared lines’ as when two or more characters share a line of iambic verse between them (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2022).

The script was mostly written in short sentences and/or lines, answering one character to another. In some parts of the script there were long pieces of text, like monologues for some of the characters.

The rapid lines would represent the pace of the heartbeat, the nervousness of the characters and the longer chunks of text or monologues would represent when the characters were opening themselves up to the others and exposing their soul and true thoughts.

The conversations in the play were fast. Had I known my partners’ lines it would have helped me to achieve the speed required by the script-writer to answer back to my scene partner. I found it hard playing at that pace because despite trying not to leave any beats in between the end of the line of my scene partner and the beginning of my line, rarely did I succeed in continuing their lines with mine.

I played Pete in the second scene and I played the mother of Helen in the sixth scene.

In my scene, Pete is being scolded by his boss after the presentation he made for the new campaign he had been working on for this new client.

His boss is furious as Pete has done a 'suicide campaign' and his boss believes this campaign is inappropriate for the product they are selling and for the reputation of their advertising agency.

Kantounas based his play in real facts: A 'suicide campaign' was made by Hyundai in 2013. The company had to apologise publicly about it.

Our director gave me some notes about how my character Pete was in my scene, suggesting I watch Stan and Ollie (2022). The Pete of my scene was naïf, not really understanding why his boss was so angry at him because Pete believed he did an exceptional job.

My challenges with this character were:

1. Not letting my personality take over.

2. Playing naïf without overplaying it.

3. Finding out what was the situation he had with his father, the previous circumstances (Stanislavsky, 2013).

4. Finding his walk.

5. Creating a backup story for Pete.

6. A specific challenge because performing in a non theatre space: Making sure the audience could see you so showing your face at least once to every side of the room where the audience was seated.

After playing Pete my feedback was to work on:

  1. Devoicing: A vocal position close to whispering (Rodenburg, 1998).
  2. Owning the stage.

My second character was the mother of Helen, the actress who committed suicide. She appeared in a scene after the funeral. In that scene there are three characters: Pete, her husband and my character.

In that scene, she seems not to fully acknowledge the passing of her daughter while welcoming a complete stranger to her house after the funeral of her daughter.

These were the challenges I found with this character:

1. Her walk.

2. Her backstory.

3. How she speaks.

Initially, I was taking many elements from my late grandmother who I thought resembled in part to this character. But soon after I started to rehearse, it became clear that my reference was not the right one for this character. It was indicated by the director that the mother had a difficult relationship with her husband, the type of a relationship many couples experience after years of being together, sometimes even despising each other. The mother felt her husband held partial guilt for their daughter having committing suicide.

Our director advised me that the best acting was one that is truthful and to focus on playing a mother who had lost her daughter.

In our rehearsal, prior to the show, I tried to concentrate and place myself in the moment of grief felt after burying somebody very close to your heart; I tried to be in that place of loss.

This is the feedback I got after playing the mother:

  1. Do not play the emotions. According to Sanford Meisner, “Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” (Atex, 2022). Since last semester we have been using in our classes Meisner's technique: His technique relies on motivated impulses over intellect. Meisner encouraged his students not to “think too much.” (Meisner and Longwell, 1987). And when you do not overthink you do not play the emotion but the emotions are naturally expressed through your lines.
  2. Devoice: Some actors, when performing, have the tendency to go quiet and bring their voices towards them rather than towards the audience. Devoicing is a vocal position close to whispering (Rodenburg, 1998).

Considering myself an artist and a creative person, I was excited to take part in the production design of the play Grief, designing some of the props and even a poster for the play. The posters for the suicide campaign Pete designs for the meeting prior my scene can be found in the VIDEOS section of this web. I also created some TikTok videos for the play which can be found in this link.

We had a fantastic challenge regarding the space where we were performing Grief as our director, Ed Hughes, decided to do the play in the marketing suite of UEL Stratford, instead of in a theatre.

The first challenge of his choice was clearly performing in a space different then a theatre, where the spaces of the stage and the audience are clearly determined. We had to sit where the stage of our play was and where the audience would be seated.

The second challenge was that we did not have any backstage area. Not having any backstage area meant the following:

  • Actors had to always be present, even if it was not their scene. The actors were going to be seated while not performing.
  • We could not have drastic costume changes as there was no place to get changed.
  • Props had to be kept minimal as we could not store them and we could not have massive scene changes as we were all in one open room.

Our third challenge was how we were going to show the different sets for the various scenes without being able to do huge changes for the scenes because of the limitation of the space.

The marketing suite is a special room built within UEL Stratford that recreates a real marketing room with five white long tables along the room and two big monitors by each table and five to six chairs by the tables. The space challenged how we were going to play Grief as the room itself was the stage. I was personally thrilled about this challenge because I loved the idea of performing around the audience without a clear definition of the stage, following the steps of Grotowski and his idea of the poor theatre (Grotowski and Barba, 2002).

In the script there are two scenes that are set in the advertising agency: scene two and scene eight.

We came with some creative ideas, thinking divergently and, as mentioned in this article of Clutch.com, as creative leaders we look at things in new ways and solve problems by seeing things others did not see (Clutch.com, 2018) for using the space that served the play.

After receiving such an interesting challenge, these were my first thoughts:

  1. Creation of digital posters representing the 'suicide campaign' created in the play by Pete and projected in the white walls of the marketing suite.
  2. As the scenes are set in different spaces and we could not change the space, the creation of images to project on the wall of the marketing suite that would elicit the idea of the space where the scene was set (for instance the garden, Helen’s parents’ house, Pete’s house…).
  3. With reference to the music used in our performance, I thought about using well known tracks from TikTok for many reasons; firstly, because the idea of social media was implicit within the play. How people tend to spend more and more time on social media and sometimes even create a persona about themselves completely different from their reality. Following in a different way but similar in essence, the idea of the digital double was developed firstly by Artaud and then by Dixon. Dixon in his book ‘Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre’ (Dixon, 2015) considers ‘digital’ as ‘an enabling concept’ which ‘includes multimedia and interactivity’. In one way, users of TikTok (or any other social media platform) tend to show an image of how they would like others to see them and sometimes that image differs drastically with the real person outside of those social media platforms. This idea of the digital double could also be applied partially to the image Pete had of Helen. She was an actress so he believed he knew her because he had seen her films, interviews and photos; Secondly, using those tracks would help people relate to the play and the idea of social media because TikTok is a platform used by people of various ages and also highlighting the ideas of isolation in big cities, the increased screen time by the general public and the consequences of both circumstances or behaviours; Thirdly, everyone in our MA class was playing Pete and despite us all wearing black, our outfits were somehow still different. I thought an interesting way to approach the transit from one scene to another would be Pete having his headphones on and playing the music for everyone to hear it (soundtrack in between scenes) as the music he would have been listening to. In this case Pete would always leave a scene with his headphones on and enter a scene with his headphones on which would make the audience much easier to recognise Pete. The idea of using headphones was also inspired by the character of Pete and how a real 27-year-old male in London would be. After my observation in the streets of London, I realised people within that age group and most people in general might have their headphones on while around in the city commuting.

As an MA student who has worked in production design in the past, I was utterly excited about the challenge of taking part in the production design of the play Grief.

The production designer of the play was Michael Vale. Vale has designed the sets and costumes for many theatre and opera productions both abroad and in the UK. He has worked with The Royal Opera House, The Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre among many others (Michael Vale, 2022).

Every single decision made about our costume, props, set design, and light and sound design were made understanding the challenge we were facing working in a non theatrical space.

Vale decided each of our outfits, focusing on keeping it simple and effective because we all played Pete. Vale decided Pete would have a very basic costume; all in black and with trainers. The challenge was that we never left the stage, even while we were not acting in our scene, so we needed a costume that could allow us to jump into a second character that was distinctly different from Pete but without a major costume change. Vale overcame the challenge, choosing a very basic costume for Pete and then having us add an extra item or accessory to the outfit to distinguish our second characters.

Vale opted to use the screens that were already set up in the marketing suite and make the stage for the play the full suite for the scenes, where the actions were inside of the advertising agency; however, actors were to use only one of the tables and one pair of screens in those scenes. For the other scenes we either used the central space of the marketing suite all the way up to the door, de limiting briefly the audience from the stage. And for the scene in which Pete is on the phone watching television, Vale set up another table and pair of screens which would give the idea of a different scenario/place. Props were kept minimal in each scene to ease the flow in-between scenes.

Lighting was also kept simple, with two sets of light points at each corner of the marketing suite; one blue and one red, the light dimmer function was also used.

We had a zoom meeting with Vale before our performance where our director Ed Hughes introduced Vale to us and told us about the decisions he made about costume, props and use of the space and the reasons behind taking those decisions. We met Vale in person the day of the performance where he checked; our costumes, the stage, the props that we brought and those we made (the posters), the set, which spaces were better to use for each scene and how the lighting would be used during the scenes. The director and production designer worked in tandem supporting each other’s ideas and helping one another in overcoming the challenges of working in a non theatre space to deliver the play.

Having the experience to observe how a professional production designer worked together with a professional director and actor and overcame the challenges of working in a non theatre space with a very limited budget will help me to develop my next performance for Project on a Bus Shamanas We Are and Gift: And Now What. It became an immersive theatre performance because of the space our director decided to use for our play. The public was encouraged to interact with the actors at some points throughout the performance which was inspired by the type of theatre brought by the British Company Punchdrunk to The United Kingdom (Carlson, M. (The City University of New York – New York, 2015). For my performance Gift: And Now What, I would like the audience to interact with it but in a different way than we did during the performance of Grief. At the moment I am envisioning the audience interacting with the digital projections that will be shown during the performance and alternatively also with the music played during the performance, or even creating digital content during the performance.

For my project Shamanas We Are, I am borrowing the idea of ‘less is more’ applied by Vale during the production design of the performance Grief. Understanding that simplicity properly applied can be extremely effective. This performance is a movement and dance performance representing three different stages throughout the life of a woman and the idea of shamanism within the female community of the world. I am using, as Vale used, images, audio and music to help deliver the story of the performance. In my case, I will try to infuse a sense of trance on the audience in an attempt to bring the audience to the world of shamanism.

The video of the first performance of Grief can be found here.

Teacher: Ed Hughes

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*This is a project for my MA Acting for Stage and Screen at UEL, London (2022)

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