Rehearsal 1 - Melodrama vs Naturalism

In today's lesson we went through two types of theatre styles which we found were really important for us to acknowledge because we needed to establish the border between each one. The Cherry Orchard is suppose to be a naturalistic play so we needed to understand what the opposite of that was so we could see whether we were being naturalistic or not. This is called melodrama, this is where all sequences of the performances are over done and over acted and everything is very over the top.

We first looked at the archetypes of melodrama; a archetype is a universal view of a specific thing for example, a archetype of a little girl would have a doll or teddy bear, a skip to her step and a long smile. We looked at all the archetypes which are seen in melodrama. These are; the henchman, the prince, the hero, the villain, the damsel in distress and the protecting mother. To create these characters it was important that we started our bodies off in neutral so our bodies were free enough to transform when we were creating the character. We walked around the room in neutral and when the name of the archetype was called out we had to transition into them. It was important that this was done at a moderate speed so it was instinctual but we could make it clear.

After we had found our archetypes we got into small groups and devised our own piece of melodramatic theatre. My group discussed that it was very important for everyone to be over the top and flamboyant. The key to this was large movements and overly expressed faces when we act. For me, I was playing the role of the hero, when I arrived onto the scene I had to come on with a broadened chest and a deep, bellowing voice; this is because it was very important to show who was playing which archetypes.

Because we now understood what melodrama was, it was really clear for us to understand how to act in a naturalistic play. This is why for the second half of the lesson we started to look at naturalism. There are no clear archetypes in naturalistic pieces because in real life people's characters aren't read as easily in most cases. So we split up into new groups and we began to create naturalistic pieces. We highlighted that it was key for everyone to show real characters, real setting and a real scenario.

When watching the melodramatic pieces and naturalistic pieces after, you can see why Stanislavski started his new philosophy of theatre. In melodrama, the pieces are hilarious and fun but they are not realistic and or relate able. That is probably why Stanislavski started his techniques because he wanted theatre to be relate able and realistic.