On preparing for the role of Dakin…
For this show, aside from learning lines and doing accent work for both British and French dialects, I have been watching a TON of the best TV and films from the UK, to get a real feel for how they talk and act. The replacements of the sounds isn’t always enough, if you can get the sentence cadence and body language into your character then you have really sold it. As for the rest, I can readily identify with some of the things these students are going through on the human side, so that just has to be tapped into.
Thoughts on Dakin…
Dakin is interesting because he is that overconfident 18 year old badboy, who thinks he is going to live forever, but at the same time has some pretty human moments in the show. I am not that oversexualized badboy in real life, so that’s been interesting.
Hopeful takeaways…
Firstly, the moral grey areas are one of the strongest things about this play. You like Hector, but you don’t always like what he does. The headmaster has our best interests in mind, but they happen to line up with his own selfish interests. Secondly, the dialogue about education is very important to me. I was taught for the test, and I was very good at taking tests, and I remember so little of that part of my education now that I am an adult and that makes me very sad.
On playwright Alan Bennett…
I was not familiar with his work at all, other than this show so I can’t comment on anything other than The History Boys. That being said, this play is fantastically written and brilliantly captures a time and a place in England that is very different, and yet so similar to when I was growing up.
Favorite scene(s)…
I have a couple of favorite scenes, but I think they are all about the same thing at heart. There is something very compelling about moments when the teacher-student relationship gets challenged. Mrs Lintott has a line in the show that says something to the affect of “the hardest thing for a student to learn is that a teacher is a human being, and the hardest thing for a teacher to learn is to try not to tell them.” There are several moments in the show where this boundary is tested, and its always very compelling.
Favorite character(s)…
This is an odd question because you definitely have favorites for most of the play, but in the back 10 mins of the show some of that stuff can change with the visions of their futures. Within the actual context of the main show, I think Irwin might be my favorite character. He is an extremely human character who puts in airs in the classroom, but is far less confident in reality. He is easily identifiable for this because he is not long out of school. At the same time he is very observant of the way the world works, very intelligent, and yet somehow is sometimes the ‘bad-guy’ because of his part in the education debate.
On working with Available Light Theatre…
Well, as a company member of AVLT, I always have a positive experience, because I am one of the people trying to build one. I am happy to be part of Drew’s directorial debut with AVLT after having acted with him in so many plays.
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