Evaluation

Commedia dell’arte Evaluation of the final show

The show was a success in my opinion; I didn’t see that there were many faults in what we had done in the performance itself. I also thought we had a very limited time to prepare we did try to put in 100% effort. We finished a whole devised piece in less than a week, which seems pretty crazy, but I think as a class we enjoyed the challenge. We also had lighting and a fully working stage and set, which really brought the play to life.

The set was put together on the morning of the performance, given that this was very quickly produced it was a simple staging arrangement consisting of hay bales and three walls. It gave a period atmosphere that linked to the time in which it was set and added to the quality of the production as the colours of it where based on natural tones. I think its simplicity gave the actors more of an opportunity to stand out from the set and make the play come to life with physicality and the masks. On the other hand I think the hay bales where quite hard to manoeuvre around, this was because the play had a lot of black outs which meant the actors couldn’t see anything so we kept tripping over them, however with more rehearsal along side the set we would have had more chance of getting used to the space and working around them.

Our costumes were also simplistic keeping in period with the set, the colours again were in natural tones. The majority of us wore beige tunics and white long johns, and a belt for our weaponry (usually the Zanni’s, Brigella’s and Columbinas would wear this). The hierarchy of the character within the performance was portrayed by the costume they wore. They wore something of a slight different colour to everyone else. The long johns and tunics were quite easy to move in as the bottoms were loose and the tunics were baggy. However in the case of the Cyrano Debegerac actor this was different, she found that her cape got in the way of her sword fights, so she had to take it on and off which led to predicaments behind stage, to improve this she could have a shorter cape or not have worn one at all.

The masks are worn so that the actors can play different/multiple characters and it also depicts who the characters are. They also add to the comedy as they are funny looking. From speaking to an audience member I found out that apparently when it got to the fight scene it got slightly confusing for them as they couldn’t point out who the Spanish party were and who the French were. To resolve this we could use the red tone masks for one side and the black colour masks for another.

Props were quite the challenge as people got hurt by them in play and also they would get in the way as we didn’t have proper holsters for them, we would have to tuck them in our belts and they were quite large swords so they might hit the ground, due to the physicality of this style of theatre, (lots of movement) people would get hurt by props banging into them as we passed. This could be combatted in a number of ways next time by either reduce the amount of things on set, reducing the amount of people on stage at any one time or alternative ways to store the swords within costume.

A strength in our performance I think was the multi cultural characters. We had characters that a wide variety of difference audience members could relate to. For example we had Jamaican, Spanish, Turkish, Africans etc. We also had different British accents, this was also handled sensitively so that no offence was caused. This aided characterisation of the roles by making each of them individual and easier to tell the difference between each of the characters as the masks can get confusing. The use of language also enhanced the comic delivery of the characters. As we didn’t include any music or other false sound effects this enhanced the comedic quality of the performance. So to improve the performance in terms of sound we could have added in more sound effects like horse shoes in the war scene. However the slapsticks gave quite an impact on sound as well, for example the scene where James and I are being hit on the behind with them which made it sound like we were singing a song and made it sound painful when it wasn’t which advanced the comedy.

The lighting was pretty much natural throughout, though there was one exception when the character Cyrano was fighting off “100 men” the lighting changed to red to indicate that there was lots of bloodshed. The blackouts were quite frequent which led to scene changes being quite challenge with there being no light. To improve on this I would try to take out some of the blacks and try to make the play flow with the lights on.

One of the most memorable moments was the scene was the Turkish man and Russian man trying to communicate. It was most memorable for me as the timing was good, and got laughs from the audience and they always clocked the audience which made the audience want to watch them. This was also a key piece of dialogue because it set the comedy up for a related joke later on in the play. The dialogue throughout the play was largely formal given that it was based on a battle and grand period gestures of love. Also most of the plot was based on how we communicate so it is funnier to the audience because they could relate. Though it could have been improved by ones who were speaking in a completely different language by introducing more hand gestures and body language so that the audience had a clear understanding of what was going on.