21/11/16-Single

This lesson we started to stage Scene 4. I play The Clerk in this scene, previously I  had read over this scene. From looking into sub text I gathered that I should portray The Clerk as a rough, dodgy character. However after reading over the scene with my teacher. We decided that The Clerk should be portrayed as one of them posh receptionist who is always annoyed and has a bland expression. I think that this was probably the best representation i just interpreted the sub text wrong.

 So far in Mother Courage,  I have been focusing on voice as one of the main skills that I would like to develop. As I am playing 3 different characters, using an accent will help distinguish the characters between each other. I think focusing on accent/dialect will help me in the development of my characters. There have been many struggles, for example at the start of Mother Courage before we was given our roles I would try characterising certain characters with different accents from around the British isles, however the one problem that kept happening was that I would found myself not sticking with one accent, I would end up travelling around the whole of the UK using 4 different accents. Once we was given our roles, I think that I found it difficult finding a voice for each of my characters as I found myself sounding the same. For scene 5 where I am portraying The Clerk, using Accent/Dialect is extremely important. Using a posh accent effectively will mean I can show the clerk is quite snobby and didn't really care about his customers. This something I  really need to focus on as The Clerk only appears in this scene.

I have done some research into accent  and I have come across this YouTube video about posh accents. The video is by someone from america, I thought that if i could use someone form a different region with a different natural accent to mine. I could analyse how they have interpreted the British accent, and I did. Here is the video:

In the video Professor David Ley talks about how posture can affect the sound of an accent. When I am portraying The Clerk I am sat at a table, which will be the receptionist's desk.  I am going to try and sit as upright as I can, hopefully this will aid my diction and the way I speak. He also stated that  people from different regions of the world use their tongue on certain places in their mouth, this creates their accent, moving your tongue downwards will help produce the stereotypical British sound. He suggested putting a hard boiled sweet at the back of your tongue and try to speak without it moving, this will keep the back of it down, this will help you make 'ah' sounds. I am going to try and use this exercise on The Clerk to see if it makes any improvement on my accent. Lastly he stated that Quadrisyllabic words will become triple syllabic words, I will also see if this works as well with some of the words The Clerk uses.