Expert: Peter Messaline - 8/16/2007

Question
QUESTION: how do i begin to develop my character?i need to become a character but i dont know where to begin.

ANSWER: This is the basic question underlying all acting!

People have very different ideas about whether you should develop a character at all (or be what you are in the reality of the play), and if you do, how you should do it.

I could make a start, though, and give you some ideas to think over, if you will tell me what character you are going to be playing. Describe the role, and give me the name of the play, in case I know it.



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: the character i am playing is Nora from Ibsen's the dolls house.

She is a house wife who lived to please the men in her life this becomes apparent when she begins to show off her stockings to her admirer Dr Rank.Nora has found her self in deep debt, she had borrowed money secretly from the bank by forging her fathers name. the money was needed desperately to save her husbands life.  when the clerk from the bank discovers she had forged the signature he uses the IOU to black mail her into saving his job at the bank when her husband decides to dispose of him. it is a story of lies, betrayal and discovery.

Answer
Nora!
Phew.
OK, first thing is to read the play quickly all the way through. Don't worry about bits you don't get, time enough for that later, just go for a good feeling of the shape.

Read it again, but only Nora's scenes. This time it would be good to read it out loud, at least Nora's lines. Mark the places you're puzzled by what's happening. Go back and try to work them out. Ask others.

Now you're pretty familiar with the piece, and the words won't throw you -- look at each scene Nora's in. What has she come into? Read your lines. What do people want from her? What does she want? When you've made notes and thought it through in detail, read it aloud again without stopping. Does what you're saying remind you of anyone you know? Let that person be part of the way you read.

And that's how it goes. Reading and thinking, and letting it sit while you do other things, and discovering that something has changed while you were going to a movie, or whatever, and the character is sounding or feeling different.

I don't think you can aim at being able to write the character out and understand each corner. We can't do that in real life, with our own characters! Simply get familiar enough with the words that you can spare some attention to the situation she's in. You have a harder job than the audience, because you have to play the other characters, and build your own rooms in your imagination.

You have been given a huge job, and I hope you have a sympathetic director's ear to talk to as you work on it.