Interpretation: Beautiful Burnout

I think that some of the language that some of the characters speak could tell us about their background or just their life in general. For example, I think we can tell that life for Dina is very difficult when she does her monologue. In  her monologue, Dina uses an awful lot of swear words in showing her frustration to the audience about being the only female boxer out of all of them. She is frustrated about being the only female because she feels that Bobby won’t give her a chance at trying to turn professional because he is worried that she will get hurt. Dina shows in her monologue and also in other parts of the play that she is a lot tougher than Bobby makes her out to be, which I think is what makes her even more annoyed at him, because I think that in a way she thinks that Bobby is implying that she isn’t strong enough to be professional which is why he decides not to include her along with the other lads to think of turning professional by saying “I just don’t want to see you hurt”.

Language: Beautiful Burnout

With Beautiful Burnout being set in Scotland, the characters in the play all spoke with a Scottish accent. The script was also written in Scottish dialect, so it had words such as 'aye' and 'oot', which were actually 'yes' and 'out', but were just written differently to make them sound Scottish when  they were spoken. I think that the script was written in Scottish dialect to make it more realistic for the actors when it came to reading the script and playing a Scottish character. This was the same for the script of Gotcha, as the story is set in a London comprehensive school, so it was written in a different dialect to make the words sound different when they were spoken to make the person speaking the dialogue sound like a Londoner. This included words like 'innit'.

Vocal Awareness/Characterisation: Beautiful Burnout

Performance with Bubu, Jorge, Shane, and Chandler
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiD9h3fF_h8&feature=youtu.be
In one of our lessons, we looked at a short piece of text which came from the script of Beautiful Burnout. We looked at the which characters were in it and also what was going on in the part of the script we were looking at. We performed Scene 14 'Three Favourite Sons', which is the part in the story where Bobby is talking to all of the boxers about turning professional, everyone except for Dina the only female boxer in the gym.

We had to perform this in groups. For this performance, I played the character of Bobby Burgess (the coach); Shane played Ainsley Binney; Bubu played Dina Massie; Jorge played Cameron Burns; and Chandler played Ajay Chopra. With the play being set in Scotland within the play, I decided to put on a Scottish accent to make my character more realistic. In terms of my vocals while on stage, I said a lot of my dialogue in quite a serious tone because these were the points where Bobby was talking to the other boxers about becoming professional. I also spoke some of my dialogue in quite a harsh/angry tone, which at this point was when Bobby was losing his patience with the other boxers. All of my dialogue was said in a low pitch. In terms of pace, I found that the dialogue which was more serious e.g. becoming professional, was spoken at a more fast pace; and the less serious dialogue e.g. I think in terms of volume, it is similar to what happens with the pace (how serious the dialogue is).

In terms of physicality, the way I stood on stage was quite tall and broad which I thought showed superiority over everyone else in the gym. I thought that in terms of my emotions, I had to be quite strict and tough when talking to the other boxers so I got across to them how serious turning professional is. In terms of my vocals, I thought that my voice had to be well projected throughout the performance to once again show in my emotions the seriousness of turning professional.