Group 2 Critique

Nick Toth

Levi Weekes

Amzad Hossain

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”: this is the line that drew us to choose these scenes. It seemed to us that the characters that spoke these lines had something to hide. They seemed somehow disingenuous. Their answers were vague and never seem to truly answer the question that was directed towards them. It was almost as if they were indifferent to everything, avoiding revealing too much about themselves and why they were there. This of course turns out to be true, as we learned that they were there to spy on Hamlet.

During rehearsal, while we were practicing speaking our lines out loud, we realized that acting out the scenes gives us a far different perspective of what is going on compared to reading the scenes silently. While reading, we tend to ignore the words that aren’t familiar to us, especially in Shakespearean Era English, because of its often hard-to-pronounce or difficult-to-understand qualities. However, this tendency to ignore words turned into a process of discovery. “My honored Lord…My most dear Lord…My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do you both?” These are the first three lines that appeared in our scene, and as soon as we said them the first time, it just didn’t feel right to us. There was something that we were not doing properly, something that we’re missing. We had to gain an insight into why those words were chosen, and the manner in which they were said. Words create the characters, their demeanor and their presence on stage; they must be used in the proper tone and manner in order to convey the desired message that the character wanted to get across. When all these elements are put together correctly, the words and delivery, Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern are brought to life on the stage.

For example, something that was very useful was that this past summer one of us watched ‘The Comedy of Errors in Central Park. His experience of watching the play live came to our aid in our small squared recording room when we were trying to figure out what it was that we weren’t getting right. This was our voice; we were not using our voices in the right tone. We also had to use proper gestures and body language to support the tone we were speaking in. Originally we were all very stiff, not moving around, and it came off wrong. After some time, we read in-between the lines and imagined what type of actions would be going on while these words were spoken. We stood still on the ground as if we had been nailed in there.

After a few trial runs, we felt that we had finally gotten the proper tone and gestures down pat. We combined all of it together in order to try to bring these characters to life, the best we could. We changed our tone when needed according to the dialogues, to show the tension that was happening in the scenes. The words found the characters, and characters found the words. Finally, after some diligent analysis of the lines in that small, square and dimly light room, we believe that we found a proper voice to tell the story of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

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