Today I am a little unwell and a cold is coming through our cast. I’d love to attribute my lack of energy in our scenes to that, but that may be giving my illness too much credit.
We did scene three of act two, which involves reaching a high-tension moment with Poirot and lifting him up by his collar. I found a ‘Dorito’ analogy (below) to be quite useful when thinking about how strong Colonel Arbuthnot is. I need to instill fear into Poirot, and I tried playing with that today, as well as using substitution to give the scene its needed energy.
I don’t have this part of Arbuthnot fleshed out, so I knew that if I acted authentically I wouldn’t find the heightened emotions the script called for. Just accepting this would be a waste of a rehearsal, so I replaced Arbuthnot’s dear friend Colonel Armstrong with someone important to me so could react genuinely. Uta Hagen mentions this technique, where you replace ideas in the play with personal experiences and transfer those feelings to the object over multiple rehearsals. This will allow me to both relate to and further understand Arbuthnot and react as he would. Over the next few rehearsals, I hope to phase out my experiences and feel Arbuthnot’s truthfully.
In the coming days, I need to ramp up documenting some of the sections I want to include in my senior project. Much of the work up until this point has been building a basis that was actively changing, and now that many things are set in stone I can begin to write them. This may become a bit of an experiment: Does writing out my ideas help build the ideas? Does it allow them to help me in rehearsal to a greater extent?