Week 1 Log

In rehearsals we was given our scripts. I was working with Tracy and we did the play Hamlet. I was playing the character Hamlet and Tracy was playing Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. What me and Tracy did was read through the scene and tried to make some sense of it. Alex briefly explained the scene to us, he told us its the confrontation scene with me my mother, but my dads ghost appears and I start to go a little mad.
At hearing this i got really excited because I thought it would be a fun character to play. so we read through the script and it made much more sense.

However the script was still quite difficult to understand. I had to get a English translation. What started to excite me was the amount of lines I had. It took me a couple of minutes to fully realise how many lines i had and the my excitement dropped. We had a very long scene and 90% of that scene was all me. I find myself to be good at learning lines quite quickly but i was still worried, but only because it was Shakespeare. The mindset I had when first starting to do Shakespeare was that because it was SHAKESPEARE it would be difficult.

I spent this week learning the basics about the story of Hamlet, as this was the first time doing something with Hamlet. The only play of Shakespeare i knew details about was Macbeth

Character Research

Hamlets current situation is a very stressful, emotion and heartbreaking situation. His Father was murdered and his mother is refusing to mourn his death. Instead she goes and marries his uncle Claudius, his father brother a month after he died. So obviously there is going to be a bit of tension between them all. But also Hamlets father returns to him as a ghost and tell hamlet that he was murdered by his brother so he could take the throne. The ghost tells hamlet to get revenge for him because Claudius has also taken his wife.

IN David Tennants version of Hamlet, he seems to be a very emotional confused person. He has so much of a mix of emotions going on at once and he doesn't know how to control them, hence people think he's a little mad. It would seem he is angry and heartbroken in the confrontation but that's all shown in an excited manner.
I think that is because he was drinking prior to the scene. His super objective during the whole play is to get His revenge on Claudius. But the objective during the scene I'm playing is to confront his mum and make her realise the mistake she made by marrying Claudius and how its affected hamlet. In the scene I'm talking to my mother, telling her she is stupid for marrying Claudius and offending my father, buts she's to naive to realise her mistake.
 This is all shown through dialogue, I think Hamlet is quite a grounded character so the message will be made clear by a strong vocal performance. My movements are quite aggressive and intimidating.