Quaternary
Over the last two terms I have been involved in a play called “Quaternary” which we performed a week ago at my school and also at the Central School of Speech and Drama who asked for our thoughts about the devising process. I’ve written a bit about it for them and I thought that seeing as I’ve done so I might as well also post it here. I hope you find it interesting and if you didn’t manage to see it do not worry as we are taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer (perhaps a bit far for most people to go just to see one play but well worth it). Voilá:
Quaternary was a very interesting experience for me as I have always had a keen interest in Drama and done some acting before but I, unlike the rest of the cast, had never studied Drama “academically” and had never taken part in helping to devise or piece or even just performed in a piece with such a strong emphasis on sound and physicality.
When we started off rehearsals I had absolutely no idea what to expect and was rather pleasantly surprised. What we were doing was lots of different exercises just to try stuff out and fire up the brain cells. The exercise which I was most challenged by was one were each of us drew a scene on a piece of paper with one object in it and we then had to try and get this image across to the others with our bodies and voices except we couldn’t use any words and we couldn’t do any miming of actual objects (e.g. a door). Doing this we didn’t stand a chance of actually getting our scene across and at the end of each one, although we said what it seemed like, none of us got what the scenes were but we did get a very strong feeling of the type of place it was and it was a very strange sense of having a feeling but not knowing about a place and this was a very important turning point for me where I realised that something can be very poignant without having to get across any specific meaning and the fact that people made of it whatever they wanted was a plus.
A very important point in the actual devising of the piece was once we had read through Ben Power’s adaptation of Paradise Lost (which I am told is “not much like the real thing” but I’m happy to stick with for now) and had broken it down into its core elements by writing three nouns and three verbs about each of the four acts. The combination of this with each of us telling a story of our past to do with Paradise Lost gave us the seed out of which our play grew. Slowly, under the careful hand of Zach, the stories seemed to fit into place in the story of Paradise Lost and from my perspective it gave me something more definite focus on as I had my story to develop into my monologue.
I found that a rather awkward part of devising a play is when you trim it down when you find something does not work and you have to change it or get rid of it entirely. The rational part of your mind knows that you are doing the right thing and its okay but there is a part of you that wants to cling on to what you have worked on and what you have put into it. A simple example of this is when we were experimenting with eating thread and Zach told me that I would not be doing it and my immediate reaction was “What am I doing wrong?”. In fact it was the right thing to do for my character as it showed him as being left out of the group and ended up as a very good way to lead into my monologue.
Overall, it has been a great experience and has really helped me mature as an actor by teaching me a lot of skills and putting a lot more responsibility on my shoulders (although not too much fortunately). As a cast I feel we’ve managed to bond really well and we have had a great technical team working with us from a very early stage and really helping contribute to the piece as a whole. It has also been the second time that I’ve worked on a play with University students and I have both times been encouraged by the way they treat you like equals and really expect you to step up to the mark. We’ve had our disagreements, like any cast, but it has been a joy to work on and I am very happy with the result so far.