The Dead review

“The world… is like the surface of a frozen lake. We walk along, we slip; we try to keep our balance and not to fall. One day there’s a crack, and so we learn that underneath us is-an unimaginable depth.”  

---James Joyce “The Dead”

 The story happens during a Christmas home party. Family members and friends gather together singing, drinking and dancing. Memories and stories are told by different people. Since I am doing Romeo and Juliet project recently, and I get stuck on how to put myself into the character, so I mainly focused on actors acting skills. Actually, I learnt a lot from those professional actors. 

 Start from the staging. The staging is very interesting and surprising this time because they put audiences’ seats around the stage, and there is no clearly boundary between the stage and audiences area. This new change make the distance between audiences and actors become much closer, and in fact I was very excited and impressed by this change. When Gabriel Conroy came to our side and spoke, I felt like he was close enough to touch which gave me an amazing feeling. Those characters are alive! It is like the scene with origin staging is 2 dimensions; however, the new staging makes the scene become to 3 dimensions. 

 Talking about the characters, they all have very different and personalities. One thing I learnt from them specifically is they are good at responding to each other. When Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate are singing, all other listeners wave their heads or clap their hands naturally following the music, they are not just sitting or standing still without and reactions which make me think of my own character. Besides, take Aunt Kate as an example, when she speaks the first time, she uses her finger pointing and talks with fast speed and trembling voice. Because of these, she looks a lot like an old white woman, and audiences can easily recognize her identity.