Drama - Critical Analysis

The main weakness of the theory that breaking the fourth wall and disconnecting the audience from the character allows the audience to focus on the story more is that as a performer I feel unable to pass a barrier of emotion, therefore feeling the need to restrict the emotion of my character and somehow use my character to instead emphasise on the emotional value of the story.  In my performance we began and ended with the same scene of Martha singing to her baby to interupt the action of the previous scene. This use of repetition to disconnect the audience from the character and focus on the story was successful as it gave further emphasis that Marthas character was a good mother. The key problem with this explanation is that the singing used may have in fact distracted the audience from denotating that this was used to show she was a good mother. This could have been improved if we simply decided to use humming rather than singing as it would have been easier for Martha vocally and easier visually for the audience to understand. For our performance we used multi rolling throughout. One specific use of multi rolling was when I changed role from Leonardo to the Mother in law. To present this change of role I used a Gestus by placing my arms femininely on my hip to present I was now a female character. This worked successfully as it was stripped back in the style of Brecht rather than time consuming. However to show this change of role I also announced as if a stage direction that I would now be playing the character of the mother. Perhaps the most serious disadvantage of this method is that it then slowed down the pace of the performance which we initially intended to keep fast throughout hence the reason we used Brechts technique of stripping back scripts or sentences to their key words. I played the role of Leonardo in the beginning and end of the performance. We used  brechts technique of stripping back the performance to its essentials  ( in this case the key words in our lines ) to show the essential words spoken by our characters which add to the story. We chose to include this technique in both the scenes in which Leonardo was included as Leonardo is the only character in the play who has an actual  name. The other characters are named according to their social position or role. We saw this as an indication that we should focus primarily on Leonardo which is why we used the stripping back method. We found this the most successful of Brechts methods and techniques as it allowed us as actors to control the pace of our scene and present to the audience the core essentials of the scene as Brecht intended. I also decided to break the fourth wall by interacting with the audience upon finding out that the groomsmen had purchased silk stockings. This worked well because the audience were given further emphasis on the importance of the silk as it is expensive and by pulling on the audiences clothing I drew their attention to their clothing and therefore the silk which was the main focus of this scene.