Throughout the process of making The Trial, all of the characters have grown immensely. Perhaps two of the characters who have grown the most are the Guards. Guard One (played by me) and Guard Two (played by Emma) were two of the very first characters that were looked at in the rehearsal process. The Guards enter at the start of the play and are the first characters that Joseph K meets. They come into his room, inform him of his arrest and begin to search through his things. We began by playing the guards as London police officer type characters with cockney accents. Lucy explained that she saw the guards as the kind of characters who believe they are important but in reality don’t really know what they are doing. So we tried to take this into account when performing the scene. Since the guard scene is the first one in the play it was important that the pace was set for the rest of the piece. So we kept the speed quite quick, saying our lines so that they would roll into each others. This also helped increase Joseph K’s confusion at the situation he’d found himself in.

The Guard’s scene ends as the Inspector (played by Larissa) arrives, originally Lucy wanted to keep us on the stage through most of the Inspectors scene which would show that we are all operating under the same authority. At first we improvised silent discussion whilst listening to Joseph K and the Inspector. This silent mockery of Joseph K helped us increase the sense that the guards were a sort of comedy double act.  As rehearsals went on Lucy decided to cut this and have us exit when the Inspector enters. She explained that we distracted from the Inspectors scene, which explained some important things to K and the audience. The interaction that we had standing at the back in the Inspectors scene needed to be included within our scene, so that we appeared to function as a unit, which increases the idea of the guards being a comedy double act.

This actually made the scene a lot more difficult as we had less time in which to establish our characters, especially as the scene was meant to be very speedy. But making the scene more challenging seemed to help us to make it better, as we had less time we had to exaggerate everything more, so the guards characteristics became heightened and we became more cocky. We spent a whole session working on the physicality of our characters and developing a different walk for each character. My walk involved me leaning from side to side when I moved as well as moving my feet out away from my body. I defiantly took some influence from Monty Python’s ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ sketch. This walk helped my character develop a kind of arrogance which was reflected in the way that I spoke to Joseph K. In this session we also looked at facial expressions, I decided that by raising my lower lip and one eye-brow I could adopt a kind of accusing face.

Thanks for reading, Alex