Character Study - Electra

Name: Electra

Age: 18

Family Life 

Electra was sent off to marry a man of a lower status by her mother to allow her mother and her mothers lover to take over Argos, her father has been lost at sea coming back from war so her mother went of with Aegithos. She hasn’t seen her brother since she was younger as her mother sent him away so that she could rule with Aegithos.

Personality

Electra is a woman who is strong and confident, she was born in the wrong century, women in her time were expected to just be seen and not heard and she wants to be heard as she knows her mind, she cares deeply about her family and becomes very attached to her brother.

Context

Before the play Electra has had life fairly badly and this is part of the reason why she's so defensive and more forthright as she is. During the play Electra discovers herself and the power she has over her life and her voice. She also finds a way of manipulating people and getting things out of them she also by doing this creates her own demise. After the play, I'm not quite so sure about what happens to her after all this but from how I know the character she will have let her tongue get her killed.

Relationships

Mother: She kills her mother for killing her father, so you could say it's not a brilliant relationship, her mother also sent her beloved brother away, and her away to “ a shameful degrading marriage”

Father: She never totally knew her father as he went away to war when she was young. She obviously held great affection towards her father because she killed her own mother for killing him.

Orestes: Her relationship with him is slightly complicated, he is her brother, even though she hasn't seen him since she was a child, she is now reunited with him and finds herself strangely attracted to him, this is due to the fact that they are close and are known to each other but in this case she is attracted to him as more than just her brother, and he feels quite similarly this creates the close yet complicated relationship between them.

Tyndareos: She has a very volatile relationship with Tyndareos because she always looked up to him as a great man and when she needed him most he let her down. She now has a much more skeptical view of him as a result they both hate each other. She does confront him in the play and he does see a form of where he went wrong but not much of a way.

Menalaos: Electra and menalaos have a good relationship, they have never wronged each other and he is willing to help her as he sees why she killed her mother to avenge his brother. He also keeps and eye on her and guides her in any way he can.

Helen: Electra very much dislikes Helen, Helen treats her life a bug on a windscreen and thinks she can't do anything or think for herself and Electra can in fact she sees a lot more than Helen thinks she does, Electra just keeps quiet about it. Electra also finds Helen to be lacking somewhat in the quality of personality.

Style

I found becoming Electra and being her in a production that uses both Greek influences in a contemporary play to be quite interesting, easy and difficult all at the same time this was because I felt I still needed to keep the older elements of Electra when bringing her into a contemporary production. She still needed to be somewhat stuck in the old ways such as being quiet and standing back as a woman as she would be expected to be but also to have that new age flair. Lucky for me the old Electra had already begun to explore herself and ideals, standing up to the men in her family and also getting her brother to aid her in the killing of her mother, she in some way learns how to manipulate the men in her life to help her in her endeavours. This mad it a lot easier to try and add the contemporary tones to her character. To aid me in developing Electra in a Contemporary style setting I did research into what life would have been like for Electra in the time of the original text and I found that her life would have been very shadowed and she wouldn't have seen much of the world, she would have been expected to stay at home and do almost nothing. I used internet research to gain a good perspective on what her life would have been like compared to modern times. For the Greek Chorus I didn't use too much research into actual Greek Chorus instead I looked at musicals and their Choruses because they flow and tell the story too only in song and I saw them as a variation especially with the chorus dancing and tableaux's I saw a real similarity and connection, I used this as inspiration.

Characterisation

I saw her posture as good with a slight slouch to show she was well brought up but at the same time I wanted that bit of rebellion to be surrounding her. She has a clear concise voice to match her background she may have airs about her that say otherwise but I wanted her well spoken voice to be a definitive part of her. For her emotions I found this more difficult because I wanted her to be closed off and numb to everything because of what has happened to her. I remedied this by using small hand movements a lot to show what she was feeling such as a clenched fist at her side, I wanted it to be subtle yet powerful at the same time.

Greek Blog 5 (25th - 29th)

This week started with us looking at the first act and working on how we were going to complete it. Firstly we worked through the first act straight and looked at what needed working on and what had yet to still be done. We looked at the scene where Abbi is playing electra with the chorus we worked on our parts as the chorus and how we wanted our separate minions of Tyndareos to be seen, not all the characters of the chorus could be the same so we spent quite a lot of time working on how we were going to have them come out and across. In movement we worked on a scene where as the chorus and newspaper reporters we were using newspapers in the movements in the chorus pieces, we worked as a group to show the words that Abbi was saying and how we as a chorus would react to such words and created a scene in which we were all over the place but at the same time were the interested and nosey journalists that were willing to do anything to get information to relay to the papers. In Voice we worked on sounds and how they come out and sound and to make them much clearer, this comes in with the Greek theatre because of what and how the text is set out and works it's a lot like shakespeare in a way with the difficulty of the language.

On wednesday we worked on the same areas again in more detail taking on what we had already done on the monday and adding what we had come up with over the other day. In the afternoon we looked at another section of the chorus, this part we divided up so that everyone was in groups of twos and were each given a section of the chunk of text to work on, for this part we were all lined up in chairs and used our own ideas in the pairs to enact what our lines were, this idea also came from our previous devised piece which was used in one of the performances. this proved quite the challenge and the group dynamics didn't go well here as there were lots of arguments and people were blaming others for not doing work when they were struggling, this showed that the group was not communicating with each other as they needed to be. This was causing great tension in the whole class and meant that we didn't get much work done in the time we had and that we could have certainly done a lot more in the time than what we managed.

On thursday we mostly looked at the bath scene and worked on how we would stage this as it's quite tricky, using a moving bath that when you try to get in or lean against moves and disturbs the scene and set. Through this I found that the group got quite restless and concentration went down quite a lot, meaning that work wasn't being done as efficiently as it could have been, granted it was the last day of our week and we were tired and looking forward to the weekend we should have still been able to concentrate and work as this is what we will be doing if we choose to pursue this as a career. This was further proved when we revisited the chairs chorus scene at the end of the day and the entire group dynamic was helter skelter, there were people taking control without allowing anyone any ideas this is not a good this because not only does it in still in peoples minds that one person is superior in a group where we are all equals but also that no ideas are being heard when they could make the piece an entire success.

Greek Blog 4 (18th - 22nd)

This week the first thing we did was go through our grading criteria for the Greek project so that we knew what was going to be expected of us. Doing this also gives us an idea of what we want to be included in the performance to get our grades to a very good position, it also means that we are trying very hard to work to the project to get it to the best possible standard that we can. After we looked at the grading criteria for the project we went on moodle as a group to look at some links to videos on the national theatre website giving some information on the way Greek theatre can be set and used it also gave a lot of detail on the background of Greek theatre and how it began in Greece, it also told us about how theatre was used in politics to address many issues and bring some to light, it was a great way for politicians to influence the public. The main reason we were looking into this is because we are doing a project on Greek theatre and these were to give us a few ways to go about creating these presentations in our respective pairs. For Movement we went and watched some monks from Tashi Lhunpo temple in India, they were visiting the college to demonstrate some of their ritual dances and our leader Kirsty decided we could go and watch them and see if we could find influence and ideas from the traditional dances that were being demonstrated to us in the main theatre. In voice we worked on a pop quiz on our vocal anatomy to see how we were doing on our revision and remembered information for the final test on our knowledge of our own voices this proved a lot of fun as a task as we were working in pairs for this and we just had fun trying to remember what we could and learned from each other in the process.

On Tuesday we got straight down to business and went onto mine and Dan's scene together. In this scene Orestes and Electra get a lot closer as Electra is trying to comfort Orestes and tries to get him to go to sleep as he hasn't been able to sleep well since he killed their mother. We used this scene to show the connection between the two characters and the close bond they share even after only having seen each other for the first time in around ten years. After we worked on how we wanted to stage this scene we were led in some exercises by Alex another of our team leaders who got us to work on status. To work on our status we went around the room trying to imitate the sort of status we thought our character had and this turned out to be quite interesting as some did a lot lower status to show their character at a certain part of the play. And then we watched some videos on how to further this study of status between characters, and lastly we worked on the scene after the one we did in the morning which is a scene mostly between Orestes, Menalaos and Tyndareos and showing the status between the characters that was where I found that the morning activities working on status helped a lot and you could quite clearly see the difference in status in the scene.

Overall the weeks work went well and we developed a lot of scenes which helped a lot with our characters and how they are progressing, we have also worked on our status levels and i've found that particularly helpful in how I represent my character on stage.

Greek Blog 3 (11th - 16th)

This week be began by looking at the themes of the play and how they contributed to not only the characters but the play itself and how it eventually ends. To do this we looked at drawing five pictures from scenes in the play that to us were important mine were of:

1. Agamemnon dead in the bath
2. The people of Argos
3. Baby Hermione
4. Clytemnestra's hair
5. Agamemnon's grave

To me these were quite significant, the first one was because in the script it is an incredibly descriptive scene and a horrific one at that, it describes how Electra and Orestes' mother and her lover kill their father in an attempt to gain power over Argos for themselves, the second one I chose because the people of Argos are represented by our chorus who are a big part in the play and explain a lot of the story to the audience, the third was because although baby hermione is not as featured in the play as the other characters she does become the object of attention with the ending when Orestes jumps off the cliff with her in his arms, the fourth one was because of the scene between Electra and Helen when Helen is bating Electra and I chose this from the moment when she picks up a bit of Clytemnestra's hair and turns to Electra and remarks "is this her hair?" and Electra nods "her hair was so much softer than mine but it never shone so well" to me this was a very tense scene and needed to be included in this, the fifth one was because i felt this was almost a symbol of the play itself and was a big yet small part of what goes on in the performance. In Movement we worked on the chorus again, we used the bath that we have been given for the performance from the design department. We also began using what we had done from the week before of using the thought of an emotion with each movement and using that as our movement in the scene where Clytemnestra and her lover kill Agamemnon.

On Wednesday we began with Alex again and did the breathing concentration that she does, I find this very helpful as it allows me to focus and concentrate on what lies ahead on the day. From there we looked at some videos from the national theatre website on greek theatre and how staging is the first thing you should think about in greek theatre and to have an argument within the chorus is both interesting and causes conflict within the performance. Status is also an important part within Greek plays because it shows who is who and where everyone stands within the play, such as the difference between royalty and the gods and the royalty and the chorus, these help to show where the necessary tension within the play lies. During our time with Alex we also worked on using words from the play and creating movements that worked with the words and then saying the words to the actions in different ways, my way was to whisper it which gave the overall feel to it a bit of an eery feeling.

On Thursday we began by starting on certain scenes, I wasn't a part of these scenes so Bradley, Dan and myself went off and read through the scenes that we were in, by doing this we also discussed how we could stage this, most of the staging for the scene that Bradley and myself were in had already been blocked so we knew what we were doing with that and were happy with it. The scene that Dan and I were in we hadn't blocked yet and so we discussed ideas of how we would stage this, in the scene I am talking to Dan and telling him to sleep and talking to both myself and to him, the scene is staged on a bed and then Dan travels around the room talking to Menelaus who comes in and talks to him. For this scene we felt that we would need the entire cast of the scene to create it as it seemed a very much instinct needing piece.

Greek Blog 2 (4th - 8th)

This week brought us back from half term and so from being used to lie in after lie in we had to get back into routine which wasn't necessarily easy. I found that a lot of people were un focused as a result of having time off of college and being out of routine which did make life a lot harder to get down to work, I myself found I was a lot more tired that i usually am as I had possibly slept in a lot over the half term.

On Monday we began the week by looking at the themes of Blood and Light, finding out what sort of themes we all thought could be included in this category, these included

• Forgiveness
• Honour
• Violence & Revenge

From these we looked at what sort of things we could draw from it and which parts of the play they related to. Forgiveness I felt related to the ideal in the play the overall goal of the piece, Honour related to Electra and Orestes killing their mother for killing their father because it was what the gods wanted and would protect the honour of the family. Violence and Revenge relate to the main goings on in the play, the violence for the killing of family members and the revenge for doing so, the description of their mother killing their father with her lover is horrifying and incredibly violent. 

On Wednesday we had Alex as a new team leader for the morning she got us to look at working as a group, as one this was to help us develop ourselves as a chorus. First we led on the floor with a book holding our heads up, from there we concentrated on our breathing and working our diaphragms to get ourselves warmed up. After we were warmed up we did lots of different ways of working as a team to get different emotions across to do this we particularly worked on "The Bath" scene working on our character's that work around the actors as the chorus. We worked around the bath that Agamemnon was being killed in and did our own actions to what was happening as journalists which is what we are considering the chorus to be. 

On Thursday we mostly covered a certain scene which is the one between both Electra and Helen and how Helen is accusing Electra of killing her sister Clytmnestra, she carries on bating Electra in a series of accusations. Whilst this was going on I went off to the cafe with Bradley and we went through our scene between Electra and Tyndareos and made notes on performance on the script discussing what we thought ought to happen between the characters on stage during parts of the scene and including the chorus in this and tossed around ideas with what they could do. 

I had some ideas with the staging of the play, my ideas were to use a thrust staging and move the chairs from the platforms to around the curtains of the stage area leaving exits to behind the curtains in the two corners of the staging area. I then thought we should put the bed at the base of the tiered area and still have some audience on the tiered area looking down at the bed that Orestes lays on, I then felt that the mirror that Helen uses should be near one of the exits in the corners of the staging area to allow Helen to move in, out and around the stage area. I also felt that we should use the main exits to the theatre to be the main ways to get off and on the stage, that way it would be not only more clear to the audience but also lets the characters come off and on in their own way and give them time to bring the character to life with the changing of people as the characters. 

Overall I felt that this week was far more beneficial to both myself and the group as we learned a lot more about what we wanted from the characters and the play itself it also gave a lot of us ideas as to how we wanted to stage the play and how we  wanted the audience to feel about it and it's themes. 

Greek Blog 1 (21st - 25th)

This week began to look at our new project, this project is about Greek theatre and the play that we are studying and performing is Orestes from the Oresteia by Euripides. Over the past weeks before we started the project we had been doing essays on Greek theatre to help us increase our knowledge on not only Greek theatre but the play itself.

In our first real session on the project we did casting for the parts, because the play didn't have enough characters, but also because it is rather long Karen our team leader split the roles of both Orestes and Electra into four separate roles in different parts of the play. This meant that most of us got to receive a good role and even if we weren't cast as a role we were able to be in the chorus and the chorus in Greek theatre plays a much bigger part than the characters do as they narrate and tell the story. To do the casting we went through various parts of the play and tried out a few characters each just to get a feel for what each character was like and weather we would like to play them. Being able to get a feel for different characters has also helped in my understanding of what each character is feeling and gives me a reason for their actions within the play. After roles had been cast I found out that I had been given the role of Electra 3, I did want to play Helen because I could easily see what I would do with her character, but in a way I am glad that I also did not get the role of Helen because Electra 3 challenges my skills as an actor as it is not a role I would normally play. As an actor I also enjoy trying to figure out new roles that are unlike ones that I have never played before, Electra gives me a way to look at someone who is being put in a situation where she has to stand up and really mess with someones emotions and try to get to them through that.

We ended the week on working on a scene between Tyndareos and myself as Electra 3. We used the scene where Electra stands up for herself in front of Tyndareos and tries to get him to see why they killed their mother. To stage this we used two blocks, mind you this was only an experiment as to how we would work the scene, we placed one block on either side of the room and I stood on one and Bradley as Tyndareos stood on the other. Around us we had our other cast mates as the Chorus and Orestes 3 (Dan) and Menelaus (Zach) on the other sides of us two on the box creating a diamond type shape. This scene is a confrontation between Electra and her grandfather, It is where Electra finds her voice to tear down her grandfathers built up walls and his pride. To get the effect that we wanted we used the Chorus to tell us weather they believed what we were saying and weather it was full of enough emotions that went with it. This was a brilliant way to get what we wanted out of the scene and although it meant we would sometimes have to go through one line ten times, but it worked and even I as the person performing it could feel the difference, I could feel Electra's hatred for her grandfather and her longing for justice as she had been promised this by the gods.

This week proved challenging because we were thrown into a new play and Greek theatre is not as easy as contemporary theatre as it has so many differences such as the chorus playing a bigger part than the characters of the story. The nature of the story as well with the gods and the revenge that is exacted in the play is not so commonly seen in contemporary plays or at least not in the same way. I so far am enjoying this challenge of a type of theatre that i have not yet done before and am looking forward to learning more not only about the play itself but also about the type of theatre that it lies within.

Week 3 (Revised)

This week began with panic stations ahoy, realising that we did not have anywhere near enough for the final piece. From this realisation we decided to instead of creating new scenes revise what we had done and add to that.

The scenes we had were the blocks scene, we had gotten from "I am the real Christina" to the falling of Dan off of the blocks, we realised doing the fall from the side was a bad idea because it was blocking us all from being seen by the audience making the action pointless. Instead we changed it to be facing the audience. As a group we decided to have Dan fall from the height of two blocks this proved to be a wrong decision because we weren't able to catch Dan from the height with the weight that he is, instead after the trial and error we decided to have Dan fall from the height of just one block making it much easier for us and it made the transition much smoother. Having dan fall from the height of one block and then for the scene to go into a blackout meant it was quite a dramatic scene as it symbolises Christina succumbing to the real world. In the blocks scene we also made a few tweaks such as the numbers on the invisible phone, we made the rule of doing it three times to keep us all in unison. We also introduced using clicking as it made the scene more tense but also meant we could all keep in time.

We decided to look at how comments can effect people, we decided to have Christina do a monologue about herself and her thoughts on what people think and how she views herself. We in a line all joining hands come around her and join together in a circle with her in the centre. In turns we said both positive and negative comments trying to be Christina's inner thoughts, things such as "you are strong" and "what are you doing here?". After this scene we used the ideas of mirrors, we also decided that the mirrors scene needed to have some music so we decided to use a live piano with myself playing, we used the beginning chords to the nutcracker sugar plum fairy piece, we used varying tempo's of the music speeding the piece up toward the climax of the piece when the group smother Christina with themselves. The mirrors scene came from the idea of Christina confronting herself, we used each of the members of our team to mirror Christina's actions to show how Christina is confronting her inner demons, we used lifts such as the "paper clip" to add to the atmosphere of her fighting the inner demons.

The newest scene that we have in our devised piece is the hospital scene, we came to this by looking at Anna Christina Olson's illness and thought that putting a hospital in the play would bring tension to the piece. In this scene we have Christina's parents sat in a waiting room and are a chair apart as they are separated there is a gap that Christina walks through, Dan who is playing the doctor comes out and explains to the parents that Christina is in a Coma and that she won't wake up, to add to this we added the beep of a life support machine to keep the tense atmosphere of the scene up. We then go into a fight between Christina's mother and father and an idea of the group was that we could use lifts and movement to symbolise the hostile relationship that transpires between them. In the next scene we decided to revise the idea of being on a train but instead put it as waiting for a bus and all of us sat around in our own mannerisms trying again to be a piece of Christina. Christina goes around asking people where she is and they all respond in the mannerism they are taking on, such as Rae is the slightly insane part of her mind and pulls her down and try's to warn her, the sensible part of Christina played by Connor who talks to the audience asking "why doesn't she know where she is" they all also as Christina goes round call themselves Christina as they feel that they are.

The Group as a whole has a mixed dynamic we are all very different but very similar people. A lot of us are very desperate to have our ideas heard and in this some people can seem quite pushy with their ideas, others who have their ideas are too shy to bring their ideas across and would rather just let the others come up with the ideas and sit back and watch. This causes the group to gel a lot less, another reason for this is because a few people in the group can be quite negative about what we do, when positivity is really needed because the negativity brought the group down. The team as a whole got down to buisness when it was really needed but still didn't really get a long, this could have been because we had newcomers to the group who had joined the course late but even so the group should have been able to cope. I felt it was because some people might have thought with more people their ideas would be less heard or that they would have less stage time which isn't the case. We had some difficult questions to ask when it got down to working with eachother because some of the group needed to be told to just get on and get along with their classmates when times were tough. I felt that there were two key decision makers they were Rae and Connor because they wanted to get on with it and so went with the most prominent ideas but didn't necessarily look to all the possible options this was partially because of a lack of time.

This week was a tough week because we knew we needed to work very hard to try and achieve more of our devised piece and because of this we all got quite testy at times and had quite a few arguments, which were all in the end resolved. This made it an interesting week but when we got to difficult times we took inspirations from one of the devising company's and asked difficult questions, these sometimes led to no answers but from taking some of our original ideas we revised those ideas and worked out more scenes.