Double - Performance Workshop (Sweeney Todd) - Blog 4 - 30/01/17

Today we spent the lesson workshopping a few scenes which only a few of us are in. Whilst Rob and Lorna worked on the scene between Mrs Lovett’s Meat Pies and My Friends and James worked Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir, Ollie and I worked on the dialogue before Ladies and Their Sensitivities and the song itself. This entails the court scene, Turpin telling Beadle of his intentions on marrying Johanna and Beadle telling Turpin of Todd’s barber shop. Below is the outline for blocking of this scene:

• Ollie and I stand on the stage by the black flats during the court scene, on “Court adjourned,” we start walking down the steps.
• We perform the rest of the section walking around the floor as if we’re walking through the streets of London.

Upon performing this scene for the first time to the group, there was one thing that was made clear to us: we were lacking a lot in characterisation. We were told to think about our characters, and think why they are saying what they’re saying, how they’d say it, and how they would stand while saying it. We agreed that we should both spend some time discussing how we will play our characters.

In terms of voice, I am a big fan of how Alan Rickman played the role, however, this is the same tone of voice that he uses for most of his characters so I felt that I needed something more personal for this character. I began to think of how I wanted my character to sound; Judge Turpin is clearly a very intelligent and rich man to be able to be a judge so this needs to be reflected in his voice with a rich dialect. He’s also very sinister; sentencing a young boy to death by hanging after frequent petty crimes isn’t necessary at all. I feel a deep voice will be very effective at portraying this. After this, I began to envision this character sounding a lot like Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, very deep voice and very self-dignified. This is how I am intending on playing my role as Turpin.

For movement, I feel that Turpin would be very slow as he is so powerful as an individual that he doesn’t need to worry about what speed he walks at. I feel like his movement would be very direct too as he’s very driven towards marrying Johanna which I feel would make him a motivated person in all aspects of life including his movement. He would also walk freely as he is the Judge whom everyone fears; no one’s going to tell him what to do as he has power over most people in London.

After keeping this in mind, we performed our scene again and our feedback was a lot more positive. After thinking about our character more, this allowed us to portray them more believably.
Next lesson, we will work on blocking Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir and The Contest.