Characters and Styles

WOOT!!!! ANOTHER DRAMA MINI ESSAY DONE!!!!!!



The Merry Wives of Windsor



Seeing the replica of the Globe Theatre, and experiencing the thrill of a Shakespearian play performed with wit, incredible delivery, and literally thrust into the audience, is an experience that I will never forget. Something to not about a modern production of a Shakespearian play is that it’s success, like every play, is determined by it’s ability to connect with an audience; Shakespeare has a much harder time then most, because it is written in a dialect that is several centuries old, with characters from the Victorian era. The fate of The Merry Wives of Windsor depended on creating a connection between a modern audience and Victorian characters.

Barranger describes the use of both visual and aural delivery as a “language” used by the theatrical production. The job of the actors in Merry Wives is to translate the Shakespearian text into the language of theatre, which according to Barranger is composed of “words, sound, light, shape, movement, silence, activity, inactivity, gesture, color, music, song, objects, costumes, props, and visual images.”

Perhaps the reason why Shakespeare’s works have stood the test of time is their ability to speak directly to the things that make us human, the things that stay with us; giving him the ability to connect to an audience that would seem alien to his time. But how do actors convey his words to suit the times?

The theatrical language is built to convey ideas that are so complex that they stimulate our emotions as well as our thoughts, and to convey those messages effectively, so the production can connect with the audience. From the perspective of an actor, this means stepping into not just a character, but into a whole environment, or “style”, as its described by Robert Cohen, author of Acting Power. Cohen describes the act of “playing a style” as an add-on to creating a character. To explain Cohen uses the example of an American tourist in Paris ordering a beer in French. The character of the American has not changed, but his method of interaction has. So too in Shakespeare actors must step into the role of the character, but change the style in which the character interacts to connect with the audience.

A good example of all of this from the production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, that we saw, comes from the actor playing Ford. In the playbill he sights John Cleese’s Mr. Fawlty as his inspiration for the style of play that he presented. Ford is still Ford from the Victorian era, he still speaks Shakespeare’s words, but he does so in a style similar to Faulty Towers.

There is a difference between character and the style in which that character interacts. With the changing language, and ideology of the audience, theatre changes it’s style of presentation to that audience. It once again comes down to creating that connection between actors and audience.