Remembering
October 1st 2008 03:01
One of my concerns while performing in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, was that I might have a mental blank like I did in the last Narnia play I performed in, The Magician’s Nephew. There was a long scene early in that play in which, as Uncle Andrew, I discussed my plans for sending the children to an unspecified place (unspecified because I didn’t know where it was myself).
In one performance, the young fellow playing Digory inadvertently skipped a few lines of dialogue, which meant, if I’d carried on from what he’d said with the correct following line, I would have been in the wrong place on the stage, and we’d have missed a bit of action.
Instead of managing to cover this up (as I had on a previous night when a totally different thing went wrong), I suddenly blanked out completely: couldn’t hear the prompt, couldn’t figure out why I was standing in the wrong part of the stage, couldn’t get my brain to do anything. Eventually we picked up and moved on, but there were twenty or thirty nasty seconds of inertia.
Fortunately, nothing similar happened in Dawn Treader. In fact, everyone managed to produce the right lines (or sometimes a close equivalent of them) every night. On my part this was quite an achievement, because in the previous play I’d done this year, I’d struggled to get a couple of particular lines in the right place, night after night. This might have been because I had a lot on my mind during that production, and couldn’t just concentrate on what I was doing. Or it might have just been that I needed to get my mind back into the routine of being able to spout forth memorised lines.
I was just reminded of this when I came across a site called BuildYourMemory.com. I find that sites such as this, and books of the same ilk, all work on building your memory in order to remember items on shopping lists or Thanksgiving recipes or formulae, but seldom in order to remember prose or poetry – or lines in a play. No book that I’ve come across has dealt satisfactorily with this side of memorising at all. Even books geared towards techniques of acting give very little space to memorising lines, apart from telling you that you have to do it, so do it!
In general I learnt the lines for Dawn Treader as I usually do, over a period of time, and slowly. But by the time the play came round they were all in their right place and order, and available when wanted. Considering that in all I only had about four or five pages of lines to learn, spread out over the whole play, that probably was no great achievement. But would I be able to learn a much bigger part without some special ‘memory technique?’ I don’t know.
In one performance, the young fellow playing Digory inadvertently skipped a few lines of dialogue, which meant, if I’d carried on from what he’d said with the correct following line, I would have been in the wrong place on the stage, and we’d have missed a bit of action.
Fortunately, nothing similar happened in Dawn Treader. In fact, everyone managed to produce the right lines (or sometimes a close equivalent of them) every night. On my part this was quite an achievement, because in the previous play I’d done this year, I’d struggled to get a couple of particular lines in the right place, night after night. This might have been because I had a lot on my mind during that production, and couldn’t just concentrate on what I was doing. Or it might have just been that I needed to get my mind back into the routine of being able to spout forth memorised lines.
I was just reminded of this when I came across a site called BuildYourMemory.com. I find that sites such as this, and books of the same ilk, all work on building your memory in order to remember items on shopping lists or Thanksgiving recipes or formulae, but seldom in order to remember prose or poetry – or lines in a play. No book that I’ve come across has dealt satisfactorily with this side of memorising at all. Even books geared towards techniques of acting give very little space to memorising lines, apart from telling you that you have to do it, so do it!
In general I learnt the lines for Dawn Treader as I usually do, over a period of time, and slowly. But by the time the play came round they were all in their right place and order, and available when wanted. Considering that in all I only had about four or five pages of lines to learn, spread out over the whole play, that probably was no great achievement. But would I be able to learn a much bigger part without some special ‘memory technique?’ I don’t know.
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