Melodrama

Whilst studying the techniques proposed by Stanislavski, we also needed to explore the polar opposite (melodrama) in order to understand what he was resisting against. Whilst exploring melodrama we looked at stock characters, in a similar way to the way we studied stock characters in physical theatre with Sarah in year 10, this was good, because it drew a link between the different years and units of work we had done throughout the years, also giving us a deeper understanding of the purpose and method behind stock characters. We looked at the characters of: The Hero, The Villain, The Lover, The Damsel, The Wise Man and The Villain's Accomplice. We were told to go off separately and to explore an action on noise for each character, then to regroup and come to an agreement on the action and noise we would use for that character. We decided for The Hero we would have a wide open stance to signify the power, authority, status and bravery that comes with that character and an accompanying ta-da for the overly melodramatic heroic sound. For The Villain we had a pyramid of evil in the fingers as if hatching an evil plan, a hunched look to show he is hiding something and the traditional evil laugh to make it that bit clearer. The Lover had a breathy sigh of affection with a bent knee, like in the midst of a proposal with an up-turned face to show the head-in-clouds mentality, coupled with a far-away look in his eyes. The Damsel was in given a hand to forehead and hand wide back in a swooning motion, to show the traditionalist view of a weak, hysterical woman in distress, this effect was completed with a light sigh. In the characterisation of The Wiseman, we used what Ben called 'beard acting' we accompanied this with squinted vision and a hand on the back. His stock phrase was 'I have it!'. Finally we had the bumbling henchman 'The Smeed of the stock characters'. For this we had him leading from the hips with a pushed out a stomach, a confused look and a 'huh?' sound. With those stock characters, we then began to explore why and how they were used and how they are still used in melodramatic plays today. We explored how all the internal pysco-physical acting from the Stanislavski method was externalised to tell the audience character and emotion rather than to show them, we also discovered that they hadn't understood the internal psychology of characters, so to explore how you can internalise all of that external behaviour, we looked at each character in the melodramatic way taking that as a level 10 and internalising it slowly down to a level one, this helped us explore how the audience can have the same level of understanding, but with us still internalise the character and not overdramatising it. This transition from melodrama to naturalism really helped us realise you can still have a strong characterisation whilst exploring the internal psychology of a character making them character more realistic, relatable and naturalistic.