Lord of the Rings Episode 3

Back for the final session before the audition. The Civil War song is working much better and the subtext seems to have made a difference.

We worked on playing the song today, and particularly on placing the various people and things mentioned in the text. It is amazing how powerful an actor's eyeline can be (that's the direction he looks in, not the black pencil). By placing characters around you, the audience can pick up subtle cues about your relationship with other people. It is possible to people the entire stage with relationships and still keep the story clear and focussed.

It is also important that wherever you place your other characters, that they act "naturally". We worked on keeping them in the same areas relative to each other, so that the audience is able to differentiate between, say, the band of soldiers that you fight with, and your best mates (who are part of the group but also closer to you). God is an interesting one - it is easy to put God up above you, but it's not always relevant to have him there. Of course your characters are allowed to move around the stage, but you need to "follow" them with your eyeline or at the very least make the audience aware that you are still referring to the same person.

My other area of fascination is timeline. Since the song deals with past, present and future, real and idealised, I asked the client to decide where the future lay. Each client's personal timeline directions can be different and it is good to start with what you do automatically. In my case, my future tends to be streaming off forward and right, with the past streaming back to my left, almost touching my right shoulder. Different people can have lines moving forward/back, diagonal, up/down. Notice when you think about the future or the past, which way your mind's eye goes.

In this case his future was downstage and slightly to the right. (Incidentally this was good for staring off into the distance while facing out, which was handy!) It is then easy to introduce near future and distant future, or real future and wishful future, and put these into the song journey. The singer can refer to the future while communicating with someone, or just get "lost" in the future.

I usually find that once these areas or ideas are embedded, the acting becomes much more detailed, more subtle, and strangely, more natural and more understandable. All of this comes from the text - I tend not to make it up!

With all of that in place, the song really took off, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck (no mean feat if you've seen my photo). Both he and I felt he was ready for the audition, and he was pleased to have two days to embed the information.

Well, a couple of days later I had a phonecall - he had managed the audition well, and had been offered the recall.

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