Reflections on the process of a scene study of The Effect (Lucy Prebble)

According to Stephen Unwin’s So You Want To Be A Theatre Director (2004) the role of the Director is to ‘read dialogue, hear different voices and sense the dramatic action within the text’ (Unwin,2004:3), to ‘ask the right questions about what the play requires’ (Unwin,2004:4), to understand the production and its different facets. Unwin’s view of the Director curates the role as that of an arch-collaborator rather than an absolute authority, working alongside a 'team of artists and technicians' (Unwin,2004:4) throughout a process, collaborating with their expertise to craft the ultimate vision. Therefore, an argument can be made that the role of the Director is that of a leader and facilitator through which a production develops its theoretical form into a physical being. In preparing for the process of this scene study and through practice collaborations on various exercises, Unwin’s interpretation of the Director became dominant in my interpretation of the role.

In response to Unwin’s provocation of the Director as needing to ‘ask the right questions about what the play requires’ (Unwin,2004:4), previous learning opportunities and workshops, as well as the learning undertaken through this module, I have come to focus my practice on a process of undergoing questioning, developing understanding and producing a clear narrative for the Actor and audience. Throughout the process, I aimed to challenge the Actors through a process of questions, collaborating to find the answers, and testing those answers and their clarity against the given circumstances.

A Director Prepares

In conducting the research and conceptualization of the scene study, I engaged exercises from Katie Mitchell’s ‘The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre’ (Mitchell,2009). Through previous experience, I have found Mitchell’s approach to text to be methodical and beneficial for curating a clear and objective understanding of the play-text. Her approach requires directors to position themselves with an “objective relationship to the play” (Mitchell,2009:11) as opposed to imposing their own artistic desires or interpretations, curating an understanding of the “non-negotiable aspects of the text” (Mitchell,2009:11) as the fundamental beginning point of any creative process with text.

Mitchell’s primary research tool, the Facts and Questions exercise, entails a deep-dive into the play-text, extrapolating the “main clues the writer gives you about the play” (Mitchell,2009:11) which may include things such as defined relationships, the place, the year, what a character is wearing. Through this the Director is able to organize their discoveries and responses, providing them important information to support other creative aspects later in the production such as Actors in developing character biographies or the set, costume or lighting departments. Additionally, Mitchell also curates a list of questions which are designed to highlight to a director “areas of the text which are less clear” (Mitchell,2009:11) and to enable the Director to conduct research to ascertain a more informed understanding, a holistic image, of the play-text.

In adopting Mitchell’s exercise for The Effect, I found the task of curating the facts and questions beneficial to my process, ensuring that I had a comprehensive understanding of the play-text, characters and the world in which they existed. However, I found that the task provided little provocation beyond the initial grounding of those “non-negotiable aspects” (Mitchell,2009:11). As a Director, I found myself wanting more and that the preparation was underwhelming – it felt as if the resulting lists from the task were finite and had become redundant once created. There was no natural way for me, as a director, to shift those objective facts and questions into a rhythm of questioning and therefore would not be useful to the Actors and their journey towards producing a clear narrative.

To overcome this challenge, I sought to develop Mitchell’s exercise, shifting away from simply observing the world of the play and began to formulate research and challenges which could be proposed to each individual Actor as part of their character’s circumstances. To achieve this, I borrowed concepts from Dee Cannon’s In-Depth Acting (2012), which focuses research and questioning around socio-political topics such as pop-culture, fashion, economic and political events as well as around interrogating character responses and experiences, to create third column that I labelled ‘Provocations’.

For example, whilst it is not objective or extensively definable by the text, I believed it important to develop an understanding of Dr James’ and Toby’s personal relationship with drug trails given the socio-political contexts of the play’s publication in 2012 following the drug trail scandal at Northwick Park Hospital in 2006. Invoking questions around each character’s emotive response to drug trails, such as Toby’s previously discredited trail, enabled the Actors to develop a more informed and emotionally charged understanding about their character.

Furthermore, Cannon’s emphasis on self-questioning and engaging with the “past experiences [that] have shaped you [the character] into who you are today” (Cannon,2012:67), supported my process to provide the Actors with questions which they could engage to unpack the subtext and imperative aspects of their characters which were not obvious in the text such as the details of Dr James’ and Toby’s romantic relationship; its longevity, ferocity and complications around its demise. In rehearsals these questions, which I often put to them jointly to encourage challenge and discussion, meant that the Actors often found themselves challenging their preconceptions of the circumstances, the characters and, in my view as their Director, drove them towards a greater understanding of their own characters and each other’s and how each character felt about the other. This enabled opportunities for the Actors to drive towards attaining an in-depth understanding surrounding their characters pre-existing contexts, as well as understanding the scene in a holistic way through understanding not just their character but each other’s.

Overall, through developing Mitchell’s fact-finding exercise into a tool for active analysis in collaboration with the Actors, I was able to curate a strong contextual basis for the scene study whilst also providing opportunities for discovery which provided the Actors with challenges, they may not have come across naturally. This resulted in both the Actors and myself having a clearer understanding of the journey of the scene with robust answers to a dynamic variety of questions.

The Process

Uta Hagen – 6 Questions (Observed via Rosenfeld, C. (2008) ‘Uta Hagen’s Technique’, in Bartow, A. Handbook of Acting Techniques, London: Nick Hern Books Ltd, pp. 127-168.)

In order to translate the theoretical preparation of the Facts and Questions exercise into a useful tool for the Actors, shifting those questions onto the Actors, I selected the ‘6 Questions’ exercise of Uta Hagen to support the Actors in developing their characters. Engaging Hagen’s questions; ‘Who am I?’, ‘What are my circumstances?’, ‘What are my relationships?’, ‘What do I want?’, and ‘What do I do to get what I want?’ (Rosenfeld,2008:129-135), proved beneficial to the process with my Actors, enabling them to unlock different perspectives on their characters.

Through breaking down character within the creative process, it enabled the Actors to develop their initial responses to the text, and their assumptions about their characters, through research and debate which led them towards a greater understanding and clarity of how their character exists, behaves and reacts within their world. Through Hagen’s emphasis on the given circumstances, and of the character’s wants, the surrounding factors and experiences of the characters, the task effectively drove the Actors towards a deeper understanding of their characters psychological motivations and the histories, which make the scene interesting.

As is evidenced in the video above (rhyschant2826,2024), I developed Hagen’s core task, of answering these questions in relation to their own character, to also contemplate how each character actively perceives the other. I wanted to enable the actors to conceive their characters psychological motivations and histories from the given circumstances of both characters, and enable them to share their responses with each other so they both had a grounded and clarified understanding of the personal and relational history between Dr James and Toby, from the perspective of their own character and the other. The reason for doing this was because despite the learning not being directly applicable to their own character, because it is rare that an individual knows how others perceive them, it was important for their intellectual interpretation and awareness as Actors to have a core understanding of both characters within the scene rather than to be in isolation with just their character and their characters understanding.

In responding to the exercises both Actors felt that they had benefited from a greater understanding of their own psychological motivations around the circumstances of the scene but also of both characters experiences and motivations with and towards each other with a clearer interpretation of the character’s history with one another. As a Director, I felt that the exercise was successful as the Actors “recognize[d] the difference between the

sensations” (Rosenfeld,2008:135) their characters engaged with as they moved through the scene. They began defining their answers around responses to their own character and each other’s, which showed they had developed a clearer understanding of each character’s motivations in the developing circumstances, whilst also having contextual knowledge of the influence of their pre-existing relationship. Overall, they exampled a comprehensive understanding of how the characters perceived themselves and each other, and how each character could attempt to manipulate or block the other in the dynamic between them to achieve their desired wants – they had developed an understanding of the game within their scene.

Sanford Meisner – Repetition: The Exercise (Observed in Hart, V. (2008) ‘Meisner Technique: Teaching the work of Sanford Meisner’, in Bartow, A. Handbook of Acting Techniques, London: Nick Hern Books Ltd, pp. 51-96.)

To support the Actors in developing a performance which was engaging, in addition to having clarity and routed in an understanding of character and circumstances, I chose to use the repetition exercises of Sanford Meisner. In previous experience I have found utility in Meisner’s repetitive exercises for increasing the interplay between Actors and routing their responses within reality, encouraging the Actor to react “authentically do what their character must do” (Hart,2008:51) rather than simply illuding to, or forcing a reaction. 

Through emphasising the origins of the impetus within “something tangible that is true and present about the other” (Hart,2008:53) in the scene, I was able to encourage the Actors to respond instinctively to the circumstances of the scene but to also break down their characters further and develop a logical narrative about the ongoing interplay between the characters. Through seeking to unfold the logical progression of the scene between the two

characters, whilst also attempting to develop a natural rhythm between the Actors, there developed a clearer progression of the scene that routed into the immediate circumstances of the scene but also the wider context of the Dr James and Toby’s relationship. Through using the exercise to enact the discoveries of Cannon and Mitchell’s exercises, the Actors felt that they were able to discover more about the characters and the exchanges within their scene.

Feedback from the Actors suggested they felt the exercise supported in searching for the subtext of what their characters were saying, finding moments of pause within the rhythm and developing a texture to the scene that was beyond the language and included moments of pause, of the intimacy or non-intimacy between Dr James and Toby. They both noted that the exercises were beneficial in deconstructing the scene and building backwards through saying their character’s reaction out loud through the words of the other characters line – externalizing their character’s reaction enabled them to both physically and intellectually respond in evolution of the scene. As a Director, I found utility in the exercise for those same reasons, through enabling the Actors to respond in the exercises naturally, and then to deconstruct their reactions intellectually through discussion, the repetition exercise enabled the Actors to deliver their intellectual clarity and understanding of the given circumstances in a natural manner which was both engaging and clear to the audience, and therefore successful.

The Performance

In reviewing the final performance of the scene study, (available at: https://youtu.be/21_-k9yIKd8), I believe that we were successful in creating a final product that was routed in my desire for clarity and understanding of the text, subtext and given circumstance. The performance was delivered through a process which had successfully investigated the play-text and subtext, through various exercises, to produce a performance whose narrative and contexts were based on developed research and were clear in their translation to an audience

Through using various different exercises from naturalistic and realist practitioners, such as Mitchell, Hagen and Meisner, I was able to successfully engage the Actors in various traditional techniques whilst also adapting and shifting their work where necessary to produce challenges to the Actors and their assumed understanding of the scene. Through a constantly evolving process, which directly questioned the given circumstances of the characters, focusing on the history and layered contexts of the scene, the Actors were able to develop a multi-faceted understanding of the scene from the perspective of both characters and therefore produce a performance which was clear for the audience in terms of the narrative journey of the scene.

The performers, because of the process, benefitted from an adaptable and flexible understanding of the scene which could be performed from a jointly understood position which meant that, even if something occurred where they forgot their lines or skipped a section of the text, or a technical fault or other component failed, they still could return and rely upon the product that we had carved out in the process - they could support one another and return to the meaning we had curated, the circumstances we had understood.

Bibliography

Cannon, D. (2012) In-Depth Acting. London: Oberon Books.

Hart, V. (2008) ‘Meisner Technique: Teaching the work of Sanford Meisner’, in Bartow, A. Handbook of Acting Techniques, London: Nick Hern Books Ltd, pp. 51-96.

Mitchell, K. (2009) The Director’s Craft A Handbook for the Theatre. Oxon: Routledge.

Rosenfeld, C. (2008) ‘Uta Hagen’s Technique’, in Bartow, A. Handbook of Acting Techniques, London: Nick Hern Books Ltd, pp. 127-168.

Unwin, S. (2004) So You Want To Be A Theatre Director?  London: Nick Hern Books Ltd.

Supporting Evidence

rhyschant2826 (2024) A Scene Study of The Effect by Lucy Prebble (Rhys Chant, 2023). Available at:https://youtu.be/21_-k9yIKd8 (Accessed 14 January 2024)

rhyschant2826 (2024) Meisner Exercises|Scene Study for The Effect|PX401 Evidence. Available at: https://youtu.be/PyI5KozcdZI (Accessed 8 January 2024)

rhyschant2826 (2024) Uta Hagen’s 6 Questions|Scene Study for The Effect|PX401 Evidence. Available at: https://youtu.be/lPTrEKL3lLo (Accessed 8 January 2024)

rhyschant9870 (2023) Work in Progress (Run Through) |Scene Study for The Effect|PX401 Evidence. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPhydUhSBwo (Accessed 8 January 2024)