Performance Evaluation

Yesterday, we performed our final assessment of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, a naturalistic piece. I played the role of Petya Trofimov, a student who is known to dress quite poorly but he also symbolises death for Ranevsky because he tutored her son who drowned in a pond. Therefore, every time she sees Petya she is reminded by the death of her son.

Petya was a very interesting character to play because he is not like other characters in the play. He isn't driven by his own desires and greed like Lopakhin or Ranevsky and he has a certain interest in helping people out. Although this is very good of him, he seems to get in the way sometimes and can come across quite strong to others as a bit of a creep. For example, in the scene with Pishchik he wants to help him find his money but ends up just touching him in the most inappropriate places.

My scene as Trofimov consists of him trying to find his galoshes but Lopakhin is pestering him and he is trying to ignore him. Immediately I realised that I had two objectives in this scene and that was 'to search for' and 'to ignore'. This affected how I acted in the scene drastically because it gave me a better understanding on how to instinctually react to things with my objectives in mind.

In the performance I was very good at using the space of the stage. We were told that if we were too close to each other the scene's energy and atmosphere dies out. Therefore, as one of my objectives was 'to search for' it was easy to use the space for me because I would frantically move around the stage looking for his galoshes. Also, one of my main goals this term was to work on my projection and articulation, so when I went into my performance those things were in mind. I feel as if I achieved those goals.

On the other hand, there was a slight mishap at the start of my scene where I forgot to say the second half of my line. Luckily, it was not an important line and that my partner in the scene, Hayden was able to go on with ease. I feel this shows that me and Hayden formed a good working partnership that we were allowed to help each other out so easily and this was shown because it wasn't obvious for the audience I heard.

Ultimately, I believe I gave myself justice during this performance especially considering how hard I worked in rehearsals.