Anatomy of a Suicide: Part 3

Lesson: 5th October 2017

In this lesson, we read the first three pages of Anatomy of a Suicide and talked about what each section of the scene could mean with the underlying meaning and tone of each sentence could be. This relates to Stanislavski because he said that a character should have an objective behind each line and movement. Below is the analysis of the scene that we worked on with each character's objectives and aims as well as the given circumstance and moment of orientation:

Before we looked at the script, we got into pairs so that we could create a moment of orientation. One person would be apologetic and wanting forgiveness which in the above scene would represent Carol, and the other person would be angry/annoyed at the other person but would also show that they care which would represent John in the above scene. This allowed me to view the characters in a more in depth way, especially when we began to unpick the text and uncover what may have happened before the scene began (which is another part of the Stanislavski method).

After this and after reading the script initially, we rehearsed this scene in our pairs. At first, I felt like I performed the part of John with too much emotion; in my opinion, the emotion should only really show at two points within the scene: "They pumped your stomach." and "Your uncle" because they both directly relate to Carol's suicide attempt. It also shows that John is more affected than he lets on initially and shows that he does care about her, despite not listening to her answers in the first part of the scene. During the majority of the scene, I felt like I kept the tone of my voice the same which at first I thought was a good choice because it makes the lines said with emotion more prominent. However, when I performed the lines in this way, it felt that John didn't seem to care about Carol as much. In order for this interpretation of John to be accurate, the aforementioned lines should be emotional and additionally the other lines should be on different tones to show that John does care about her but is also trying to understand why Carol did what she did. One positive about my performance is that at the beginning of the scene where John seems to be rambling about Carol's 'hunger' I ran each line into each other which shows that John is trying to make sense of the situation but is not leaving any time for Carol to answer his questions (this is looked at in more depth on the pictures of the script above).