WOLF
physical theatre, multi-roling, one man show
WOLF
Harrow School Performance
We went to Harrow School to see a ‘One Man’ performance called ‘Wolf’ and it was one of the most amazing acting I had ever seen.
It was performed by one man who managed to tell an entire story, whilst playing 32 different characters, of an anti-hero named ‘Wolf’ who was a detective and he was on a mission to avenge the death of his partner, Jay Walker.
There wasn’t any fancy props, theatre designs or costumes. It was kept simple and minimalistic. The actor wore a black, long-sleeved, shirt, black joggers and black trainers. The reason for this was because in order to create all the 32 characters, he needed a simple outfit so that the audience could use their imagination to create the appearance of the characters himself. It was also so that he could move around easier since his performances was based on physical theatre.
He also didn’t use props, instead he would use hand gestures to create the shape of the object, like miming them out, and using his vocal skills, he would creat the noises the objects made such as, the creak of a door, footsteps, a phone ringing, even small sounds that may seem insignificant. Throughout the whole performance he was focused, he didn’t break his character’s, was calm and composed and delivered it with great projection and confidence.
When switching characters, he would use a spinning gesture with a small ‘swish’ sound to show that he’s changing characters. He used a range of inferential tones, voices, dialect and accents to show what type of characters he was, changing his characteristics, facial expressions, body language and different use of levels. The only prop he used was a chair and two small lights that he wore as rings. The chair was portrayed as many things e.g a car, trolly, motorbike, office, trunk of a car etc. The lights he wore as rings were used when he was creating a specific character (Ninja-Robot?) and when one of his characters were on a motorbike.
WOLF - INSPIRATION
Harrow School Performance
WWW: After watching the performance, we decided to create a story inspired by it, using some of the same characters and adding our own as well.
We took some bits from the story line and added our own. We decided to start off by using Brecht’s technique to show the ending of the story at the beginning.
It started of with Yusuf (who played a charters called Steve) driving in his car with a hostage (Aiden) at the back. He used different sound effects to show he was in his car, using the hand gear and playing the radio. While the rest of use weren’t on stage, we used our vocal skills to create different sounds that Yusif made from each of his actions. When playing the radio, a few of us played different people to show what was on the radio e.g I started singing opera, when Yusif changed the radio, someone talked about the weather , another was promoting and advertising something etc.
Throughout the lesson, we started creating our story, adding new plots and ideas, some of us taking on character roles, others being directors while some of us created sound effects for the performance. We did really well in supporting each other, suggesting ideas telling each other what we could improve on, devising an entire improvised story.
EBI: I felt like we should really go all out with our physical skills and exaggerate out vocal skills when creating different sound effects. If we had more time, a solid plan for what our story was and what we were doing and saying in each scene, I feel like it would have been a lot easier for us. When we watched ”Wolf’, we noticed that the actor clearly practiced and rehearsed for a long time, polishing his techniques and get the timing right with the soundtracks and lighting.
