"Sugar-Mélodrama."

Showing day today again. Man it goes fast! It feels like it was 'Showing day' only yesterday.

This week's Mélo was about a parent and child stuck in a lighthouse because there is a ferocious storm outside. They have very little water left, and the child is sick...delusional sick. The child becomes sicker and sicker and at one pivotal point the child attempts to bite their parent. This is when the parent remembers many kids from the village had contracted rabies from a dog, and the only way to stop the rabies was to kill them. The parent clicks that their child has rabies too, and comes to the conclusion that they will have to kill their own child - which eventually happens - and when the child dies, the storm stops. End.

I worked as a director this week, with Andre as the father and Maria as the daughter. We worked well together throughout the week, mostly walking it through and plotting out what needs to happen when, and then this morning we put it all together. I felt like we'd done a good job structuring the play, making each scene/moment have a clear purpose and different rhythm. We also made the choice to take some risks and perform our piece a bit grander - with bigger gestures and more physicality, and more poetic language.

As a director I felt like I had a nice calm demeanour, and a good sense of how to shape the piece - particularly with rhythms. Looking back now I would have liked to create an environment in which my actors could have improvised like we do in class, and then we could have gone back and tightened things up. But we didn't fully get to that until the last day. Instead we said "I'll say something like this here" when really, like we do with Philippe, we could have just tried to make a scene. I think more pressure was needed to get there. Also, I would have liked to have more time to work on the actors' performances, but we had a script and staging to work out, which took precedent over performance work. And actually, I was happy with what Andre and Maria were doing. In this process I wasn't much of an actor's director, and I understand why others aren't too now! There are lots of other things to consider and in a way it's the actor's job to act. But of course I gave acting directions too - but it is hard to be articulate!

The performance of the piece was as we had rehearsed, but perhaps lacked a bit of the tension I felt we had in rehearsals. We had a false start, because I was using the drum to represent thunder, and Philippe found this distracting. So we had to change - we ended up flagging sound altogether, apart from opening with the sound of recorded thunder. But in our proper performance about a third of the way in Philippe stopped the scene and got Andre to change the way he was performing - more like the tough Aussie bloke Philippe had led him to previously. And then that was it. He stopped it because it was a bit boring I guess, and that's fine, but it was annoying because he stopped it just before a big change, and from then on was a lot of action. But still - if it's boring, it's boring, and an audience will leave not knowing/caring what they've missed. Philippe said our piece was like "Sugar-Mélodrama." We had tried to be grander and more poetic with the language, particularly with Andre's doom-speeches, but Philippe said it was "bla bla bla boring." Later I asked if text in Mélodrama can ever be beautiful? And he said no. It can be good, but not beautiful. Okay. Also Philippe said Andre looked at the People of Paris all the time, instead of now and then for effect. This is something I hadn't noticed, as I figured Andre's character was looking out a window. But I guess now that I should have led him to lower his view, or change up where he looks for effect.

It was just really frustrating to have worked hard (we put a lot of thought and effort into it) on a piece showing what we think Mélodrama could be, and then to have it cut short. But we still did the work, and learnt from it, and enjoyed it. So that's something.

At the end of class Philippe reiterated that Mélodrama is more a form for the actor than the writer. "It's actor."

"It's more for acting - If your story is not so good but the actor takes a risk, it's okay."

"It's not spaghetti over-cooked. It's not ohh ohhh oohh." It has balls.