22/09/2011 Berkoff

We began reading a section of the script Greek by Steven Berkoff. We then split into small groups then given the task of recreating the Cafe scene. One of the first ideas I put forward was for the actor playing the chair to carry the actor playing Eddy. I believed that this would give the actor playing Eddy the freedom to move their body and the actor carrying them to move around the stage. However we thought that this may prevent the chair from becoming a character so we instead decided to have two actors playing the chair characterized as horny men along with me playing the table who would describe the cafe's cheesecake and take the weight of the enormous cheesecake when it was bought out. One of the group's ideas was to reverse the genders of the the two performers playing humans resulting in her playing Eddy and Lewis playing The Waitress. This worked well as it was non-naturalistic, stylistic of Berkoff. A problem with this though is that an audience may get confused as to the actual gender of the characters, leading to confusion in the plot. Another idea of the group's was for me to describe the cheesecake in the style of an advert. I disliked this idea as I thought it would be difficult to deliver the whole speech while keeping the audience interested as I would have little opportunity for vocal or physical variation. Instead I delivered the line in a more sexual way as the dialogue uses emotive language and contains sado-masochistic themes. It also gave me opportunity for sexually associated physical actions where at the end, I immediately reverted back into a table.