NEW crit com

Directorial Vision/ Concept-

The scene that I have chosen is the climax of the play, where my character, the protagonist of the play Antigone is sentenced to death for the ‘criminal’ act that she has performed. Here, the audience is presented with the question of ‘What law do I listen to, the law from the God’s or the ones set by men?’ through the contrasting traits of Antigone. She is strong and defiant, yet vulnerable and hurt.

The different sides of the characters will be displayed to the audience through the highs and lows of the dramatic monologue. There will be times when she is blaming the Gods for everything, and there are other times when she come to accept the fact that maybe she did deserve the punishment that she has been given. I will be using the Stanislavski method to try and bring out the emotions that are necessary to play the role. Through the variation of pitch, volume and pace, I will be able to show the change in the characters emotion and mental state, thus leading to the main question and main conflict.

Performance Theory/ History of Tradition-

The play is a naturalistic play, set in the Greek period. It is very similar to contemporary realism in the sense that is a naturalistic play, and is a narrative. I used the Stanislavski method to get in touch with my character. Many of the emotions called for are ones that I have experienced before, and thus I looked at past experiences and tried to get in touch with my character. Physicality was also a great help, I tried to use it to figure out the impact the punishment had on my character by the severe way that she reacts to it, by changing not just her moods, but her physicality, voice, and everything else.

Evaluation of creative process-

The setting was in a cave that I imagined to be relatively small and dark, except for one hole in the ceiling from which light entered. In the area of physicality, I had to train myself to react to the cave, in order to be able to how the audience its size with out actually drawing it out for them.

The script was originally written to be performed before she was thrown into the cave, however, since it was a monologue piece, I though it would be more dramatic if the new setting was to be inside the cave, just after she had been thrown in, as in this way it would involve a lot more emotion. Also, I had wanted to end of the monologue with Antigone committing suicide, but I did not want to give the audience everything, so I decided to end the monologue with hints of me wanting to kill myself, but not actually doing it.

My costume definitely had to be something Greek, and after watching the movie, the plays that had been previously performed and searching for picture, I decided that I had to add on an additional cloth to symbolize the fact that I was from a royal family.