The style of this play is very different to the last play we done which was 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase'. ' Look Back in Anger' is a Naturalistic piece created by John Osbourne. The play bears resemblance to the work of Stanislavski this is because Naturalistic Theatre was mainly developed by practitioners like Stanislavski.
Naturalistic
Naturalistic theatre can be described as a perfect illusion of reality, this is where the actors take on the characters and try to understand what it would be like to be in that position, this effect can be achieved by using a technique called 'emotion memory', to do this the actor thinks of a time in their life that is comparable to the scene, for example if the scene is a husband losing his wife for whatever reason, you could think of a time in your life when you lost someone or think of losing your loved one and incorporate that emotion into the scene. One of the key aspects of Naturalistic Theatre is that you always need to remember to keep a little bit of yourself in the piece, you do this by using real emotions and in some cases interpreting how you might act in a situation like this.Naturalistic Theatre was brought about in the late 19th century by practitioners like Stanislavski. Some techniques for Naturalism are:
- Magic if - this is perhaps one of the most important techniques because it's when you place yourself in a kind of imaginary circle and anything outside of the circle does not exist, inside your circle you take the scene and imagine what it would be like if you were in that situation.
- A good technique to think about when performing a naturalistic piece is relaxation, concentration and imagination, it's the idea that you can train your imagination, to do this you can take an object and get a good feel of what it's like to use the object then take the object away, close your eyes and try to repeat the action without the object but imagining you still have it.
This is different from my role in 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase' because that piece was very melodramatic and unreal, for example the way the characters react to situations in Wolves is unreal and comedic whereas Naturalistic pieces like 'Look Back in Anger' seem to be less funny and more serious so the reactions wouldn't be over dramatic but it would be mirrored to realism.
