For that is the Question....(blog entry from 2010 not the new fangled 2011 - see above)

Picture if you will the dark of night descending on a large plastic roof, the patter of snow as it softly lands on the flimsy frame. We delve below into a large room, the floor is two stories down from the roof. A girl creeps in the darkness and exits the room unheard. Slowly she creeps into the foyer where she meets with an agitated man. Gently she whispers words of encouragement and favour. He hesitates. She loses her cool and lets rip a moment of anger, she questions his manhood. With this in mind, slowly he climbs the stairs. The woman stays pacing below. As he enters the first level he steals himself. Slowly he opens the office door, he sees the secretary in her sleep draft induced slumber. He ascends the second set of stairs into the teacher’s den. He opens the door. The teacher is not asleep as planned, he turns to see what is happening just as the knife descends and plunges deep into his chest. The man jumps back, momentarily shocked. He removes the knife, wipes it on his trousers and descends to find the woman pacing nervously. ‘Well?’ ‘It is done’. She kisses him and they exit as quietly as they entered.

This, my friends is what could happen if I am not given something to act that isn’t a wall, or blood or atmosphere or some other inanimate object…or even a generic scared, violent, drugged person. I will be forced to act out a Shakespeare play in life. And as I have always wanted to play Lady Macbeth I am afraid that is the first story I will go with. No Romeo or Juliet’s here.

What do you mean Hannah? You’re at drama school. Indeed. Except for the lack of drama. So basically I am just at school. Which sucked first time round.

Let me just say I do not really know what drives me to want to be an actress. I know parts of my personality contribute to make me the actress I am. I know that when I am not acting I get itchy and frustrated and look for drama in my life to replace the kick I get from playing. I am not an exhibitionist and my need to act comes not from a want to display myself, nor a want to be in front of an audience but from wanting to explore, experience and recreate emotions and ideas. At some point in this process you start wanting the audience to see if you have succeeded in your experiment. This always comes with trepidation but is a necessary evil. The final stage of the work.

Recently I have found myself to be in a very itchy state. I am frustrated. I am overly emotional as I cannot find an outlet for anything. My ideas lay stilted in my head with neither the time for me to write them nor the story for me to act them. How can you be itchy whilst you are at drama school? Well the answer is due to the complete lack of drama at school. I have not acted in a character driven story in over a year. I have not played more than a flash of a character in over a year. I am blood, or atmosphere, or a car etc. I am not an actress. I am a moving body. Even contemporary abstract dance displays more emotion than this.

I have been wondering why I was falling apart at the seams in my life but I now see I have had to create and increase the drama there. I have been playing a game in life rather than on stage. Joking aside the lines are in fact blurred. My need to explore and create never stops, it is simply a matter of how it is directed. But if you ask me to direct it towards playing the physical objects in a scene one more time I am going to end up doing something drastic. Like acting out a Lady Macbeth style plot on some poor innocent teacher in the search for the chance to act something HUGE. You have all been warned.