The Priest is the very last character that Joseph K comes into contact with in the play. He is yet another bizarre character and I for one struggled with coming to terms with characterisations for him. The role of the priest was without doubt the hardest role for me; I found it much easier to be a part of the chorus as various roles than to become the priest. For me he was a character of the unknown, I didn’t know what I wanted from it and I wasn’t sure how to play it. Usually to create a grotesque character I would take influence from stereotypes and exaggerate it, like that of the guard and the ‘cheeky chappy’ police man. However when it came to the Priest I found it difficult to select a stereotype.

In our rendition of The Trial the Priest character had one long speech right at the end of the play. I found this speech very daunting as I didn’t want to end the play on a low note after such high energy levels. In contrast with my other character as Guard two,  the Priest had long winded speeches in contrast to short and snappy sentences, he was a man of the church who seemed to be calm and collected, unlike the hysterical Guard two, who was all over the place.

The clear distinction between characters is important when multi-rolling on stage. To create a different persona from the Priest to the Guard I gave him a hunched over walk, a calmer, older voice, and a different facial expression. With guidance from the Director I eventually found my feet in terms of characterisations. One of the main reasons I struggled with characterisation was due to the fact I found it extremely difficult to learn the big chunk of speech. In all my years of acting I have never had to learn a monologue and I tried various techniques to drill in the lines, and failed several times (though I did eventually get them).

In his writing Richard Jackson Harris comments on Helga and Tony Noice’s theory of learning lines. Harris tells us that the Noice’s discovered actors who make a connection of feeling and movement to a character are more likely to memorize their lines better than someone who does not make this connection. ‘Professional actors and students using these techniques had better verbatim memory for lines than those who tried to explicitly memorize the words’ (Harris, 2009, p. 54). This could be one of the reasons I struggled as the Priest did not get as much time spent on it as the guards did due to the fact it was at the end of the play in contrast to the guard at the beginning.

Works Cited: 

Harris, R. J. (2009). A cognitive psychology of mass communication (fifth ed.). New York: Routledge.

Thank you for reading,

Emma Huggins