Upon our first read through of The Trial I knew I had never been involved in a play or performance that came across as bizarre as this one. The story and stage directions made little sense to me, leaving me feeling slightly nervous for the first rehearsal. We had discussed what practitioners we wanted to influence our work and it was decided that Brook would play a huge part in our influences, along with various styles of theatre including that of the Commedia dell’arte, and its larger than life characters.
From the offset, the idea of grotesque theatre has been applied to every scene within the play. Edward Braun states that ‘the grotesque mixes opposites, consciously creating harsh incongruity, playing entirely on its own originality’ (Braun, 1998, p. 68). That is true to our production in that the character of Joseph K is the complete opposite to the rest of the characters (such as the guards or Leni), and these characters are each entirely different to one and other, then as an audience you are bombarded with a clash of the chorus who are almost ridiculous. Each member of the chorus is similar, but still the opposite to K, creating this notion of the grotesque.
The chorus within the play carry huge responsibility in terms of keeping the grotesque manner throughout. I have never been in a play where the invisible network between the ensemble members was so important. We were always working together to create a different environment for Joseph K and our audience, often exploiting synchronised movements or creating still, grotesque tablos and imagary for the audience. Jacques Lecoq, in his writing Theatre of Movement and Gesture speaks about a chorus, and states that ‘a chorus is a body, which moves organically like a living creature’ (Lecoq, 2006, p.109). In saying this he is referring to the invisible network created amongst the chorus members. This network allowed us to work together in synchronisation with one and other throughout the play.
Aside from the chorus, the first two ‘grotesque’ characters that are to interact with K are the Guards. From day one the Guards have been an ongoing project for Alex (Guard one) and I (Guard two), and the characterisation has developed and changed throughout the rehearsal process. The original direction we were heading for in terms of characterisation was the classical comedy double act with the ‘sharp-guy-and-idiot structure’ (Medhurst, 2007, p. 123). However after playing around with the characters and with great directional structure from Lucy, we came to the decision that both Guards needed to seem like they had some kind of authoritative status. Giving the guards a cockney accent and a “cheeky chappy” stance, the characters started to unfold.
Due to the fast paced structure of the Guard scene it was essential that we knew our own and each other’s lines inside out. Lucy (Director) gave us the instruction that it needed to seem like we were finishing off one and others sentences, so learning lines early on was imperative to the development of the guards.
Once we eventually had the right pace it became easier and easier to experiment more with the character of the Guards. Together Alex and I developed a walk for each guard, he swished, and I dipped; contrasting movements that worked well together.
Here is a video of the walk we first came up with together, without the contrasting movements.
We decided to alternate our walks as we weren’t always in sync, which wasn’t a bad thing at times, but often enough it was. With different walks it was much easier to focus on our own character development which then stemmed to the development of a double act.
Works Cited
Braun, E. (1998). Meyerhold A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen Drama.
Lecoq, J (2006). Theatre of Movement and Gesture. New York: Routledge.
Medhurst, A. (2007). A National Joke: Popular comedy and English cultural identities. New York: Routledge.
Thank you for reading,
Emma Huggins