Gogol was born on March 31, 1809 in Sorochintsy now Ukraine and had been known as the Russian Empire. He spent two years at the Poltava District College and then began his studies at the Nizhyn Pedagogical University. Making him very educated and seem as he is from a well of background, probably middle or upper class this suggests he probably knew a lot about the political issues; surrounding his time and the class difference was very clear to him. In 1836, Gogol published one particular work, The Government Inspector, (which we are studying) which caused quite uproar. Additionally, the work criticized the government under the kingship at the time and many people didn't like it. This left Gogol no choice but to leave Russia and settle in Italy, Rome for a short period of time.
I did my research on the play to understand the elements and the themes of the play to be able to get a full understanding about my charecter Waiter and the korobkin.
In the begining I roughly knew how to portray the waiter because I read the script and found out that the waiter speaks a lot about Jesus so I knew that the waiter is very religious. The other character Korobkin was given to me because the original person playing it rarely came in so I was the understudy for him. I did my research on the character and based on the research I decided to portray him as middle class.
We looked at practitioners that we would be able to use in The Government Inspector. The first practitioner we looked at was Steven Berkoff. Steven Berkoff's work is described as 'The use of mime, stylized movement, exaggerated vocal work, direct asides and improvisations within an ensemble environment'. We used this in our piece, especially within characters such as Dobchinksy and Bobchinksy who are very slapstick comedy. The use of stylised movement enables us to create a fast-paced environment in our production as well as individual characters. The more we heighten the characters and make them less naturalistic, the more entertaining and comical the play will be. We also said we could use more Stanislavski techniques to create, naturalistic sections of our play, for this, we can use Actions, Thought Processes and Through Lines. This can help us get to our character with a mental approach rather than physical. The final practitioner we thought we could use was Brecht. Our show is political theatre, portraying corrupt government and even though the play was written in 1836, can still apply now. Brecht used political theatre to create performances, his main technique was alienation and breaking the barrier between the audience and the actors to acknowledge that they are watching a play that is. not real life.
In rehearsals I didn’t find any problems with my characters. The advice Rob and Sharon gave me was to play the characters big and play off more with the other characters in the scene. I also had a backstage role and was the marketing side of the play and came up with this:
We handed out leaflets to library’s and theatre companies such as the old vic, Roundhouse etc
In conclusion I say that it was a very succesfull performance and all actors were doing a very good team work which helped all charecters to develope their roles and play around with them during the performances and we all had good energy . Every one was really focused and had a good commitment to what they want to achieve.
Bibliography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Inspector
OCR, 2015. Practitioners: Berkoff. [ONLINE] Available at:
http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/281664-practitioners-berkoff-topic-exploration-pack.pdf. [Accessed 14th May 2018]
