This play is all about desire. The whole context is about strangers falling in love in n instant and all this pent up unrequited love causes the lonely characters to act unusually, thus, providing a foundation for a potentially funny play. I am going to write about, and analyse, two scenes from the play, where I will talk about the physical and vocal quality’s and how the technical quality’s coincided with them to create a magical dreamland where everything can and does happen.
The drunken party at Olivia’s garden:
physical quality’s; This scene is an excellent scene to write about in terms of physical movement on stage. The movement on stage was very well choreographed and was very effective. During this scene, I could not tear my eyes away from Sir Andrew Abuecheek who was apart of this drunken party and hid himself behind a tall lampshade when Malvolio came in to stop the party, whom by his facial expression was very angry.. This was very funny because Abuecheek is so tall and he looked like he was in great pain, which was proved by his squinting facial expression and posture, which was crippling his slender body. His circle of attention was focused on Malvilio as he was the one shouting at him and his gestures and mannerisms proved that he was very scared of Malvolio.
Even though the stage was broken up into three or four different levels, the top one being all the technical equipment, the actors only used three, the actors in this scene were only using the bottom level, so their use of space was limited. However the distancing between the characters was descent as Malvolio frequently changed his circle of attention to the different characters on stage, so the ‘dormant’ characters were able to stay static. This emphasized how all the characters responded to each other on stage, as they were able to block each other and the dynamics of the scene was also emphasized.
Vocal Quality’s; As Malvolio is shouting at the characters on stage, I thought, his accent was well done. He was British, and as he was dressed in a butler style suit with a very humerous comb-over and very serious drawn on eyebrows it reflected the general perception of a male of his stature. You could say people like malvolio support the perception of British people and the ‘stiff upper lip’ saying. His volume, tone and pitch remained constant throughout the scene, as his facial expression represented fury and the emotional range of his voice supported it.
His pace and rhythm was used quite well as he did not lose focus and the melodramatic theme of the play was supported. He did use pauses, when the audience was laughing at the surreal site of a 7 foot man hiding behind a lampshade, I feel that this really showed the relationships between the actors as they both worked with each other to entertain the audience.
Several themes are established in this play, there are tastes of Fantasy, melodrama, comedy, romance and I also feel there were very small pieces of tragedy hidden behind all of mayhem. The use of physical theatre softened the play extremely well as it is obviously not intended to be a sad play. It did its job by uplifting the audience, which was obvious due to the audiences reaction to it all. I don’t feel there was any realistic acting in the play, everything was over emphasized to enhance the humour. I believe they did this because the language was very difficult to understand as it is placed in a period where ways of speaking is very different to today’s. So it was effective to use physical theatre as you do not have to be able to understand what they are saying to find the play funny.
Thechnical;
The overall look of the set was entrancing. When entering the theatre, you automatically feel enthrawled in the play, the stage is so close to the audience you somehow feel like you are a prop on stage. This is effective, however the positioning of the seats were not ideal as you could not always see what was happening.
