TIE - Part 12

Following on from our last lesson, we continued on working on Act 1, Scene 7, using the Mixing Desk idea that has been proposed by Chipp. We looked at how we will do it, the acting, briefly at the facilitation of the scene, and looking through certain sections/quotes to break the scene apart. We started off by having differing sliders for each character - Lady Macbeth having masculine and feminine; Macbeth having guilt and ambition - however, we need generalised sliders for both characters to use and so we will be using Ambition, Guilt, and Manipulation. The intention of this was to show character traits and how different interpretations can change this - this links with our TA's spec of having differing interpretations for each quote and scene.

The scene below was directed by Chipp and shows the extremities of potential character traits that are shown in the scene to see how they may come across to our TA. Here, Bruce and Kathryn are experimenting with this idea:

To start the piece, we had Lady Macbeth having high ambition and manipulation and thus she was portrayed as mocking Macbeth and preying on his weaknesses. Macbeth's starting point is him having low ambition, with high guilt making him extremely panicked. The juxtaposition of the two characters therefore makes for excellent viewing. 

We change their traits at a key point in the scene when Macbeth says "Prithee; peace" because there's a slight change in topic/rhythm here and thus it seemed appropriate. Macbeth has much lower guilt and a higher ambition which allows him to be a much stronger character than what he was previously - his over pronunciation emphasises that he will not take Lady Macbeth's insults; Lady Macbeth's manipulation remains high but her ambition is lowered slightly. At this point we changed one of our sliders to say Morals - I suggested the use of Pity because it can be used in a negative way and does somewhat show Lady Macbeth's opinion on Macbeth in the scene, however, this was not chosen.  Lady Macbeth is still very manipulative through her low morals. Despite creating a moment of shared sorrow and connection, Lady Macbeth allows for it to be used in an evil tone which shows clearly her lack of morals.

The major issue that we need to solve for this scene is having an extremity of each slider for every part of the scene because the control of the sliders is left up to our TA and thus the actors will have to be incredibly skilled to show this.