Epsom Downs Rehearsal: Blog 3

14/3/17:

Today I thought it would be a good time to get started on creating the background for Mr Tilliotson. I will be working with the information given in the text and form my backstory around that in order to make him more three dimensional and make his motivations in scenes clearer to me. Something we were meant to make up was an object that our character holds dear. An idea I had was that of a letter. The letter is from Jim's wife explaining the reasons why she has left. There were a few reasons something like this came to mind as an idea:

- Mr Tillotson sells anything he can that's worth any money so it only made sense to give him an item that is worth nothing except in sentimental value. I was thinking of giving him an item worth something but it's so dear he can't sell it such as a necklace belonging to his wife or something along those lines, but that didn't really make much sense to me since he has sold everything else, including things that aren't his.

- He comments to Miss Motrom that he sold his children. I initially didn't know if he was speaking literally or if he meant something else by it. After a while and when I thought up the letter, I decided that he didn't and that he lost them by some other means. My idea is that his addiction got so bad to the point where he was selling his children's possessions or vital items in the house just to get a bit of money to gamble with. He was caught and then his wife left soon after but left him a letter explaining why. He uses the term "sold/sell" since it was his greed and lust for money that led to him losing them.

After thinking that up I thought it may not make sense since he says the incident with the rolls Royce is where he decided to stop gambling and seek help with religion. However there was a simple solution tot that after thinking about it for a minutes. I can just place that after his wife leaving him and make the incident at Roberto's derby the final straw which pushes him to stop and seek help. If anything that fits and just confirms how severe his addiction is, it solidifies everything he says in his monologue near the beginning.

I still haven't decided what kind of background he's come from yet, whether he was well off financially or not. My thoughts are that either way,m the tragedy of the situation is still there although if he was on the slightly more wealthy side of the spectrum then it may create a bigger contrast for him and a greater motivation for wanting to change.



15/3/17:

Today I continued trying to develop Mr. Tillotson and decided on a few specific elements of his background.

Firstly, how old he is? His age is never stated in the play but I feel he has to be old enough to have this addiction slowly escalate over a long time but young enough to believably still be learning how to cope with that, so it can give him a slight degree of inexperience and as if he's still weak and isn't making much progress. If he was older it may seem as though he would've have already gone through this which I wouldn't really believe and I just find the idea of a younger, slightly more naive man going through this to be more interesting and possibly relatable. So I've come to the conclusion that he is 34 and was born on the 26th of may 1943, 34 years before the date of this play which is June 3rd, 1977.

I decided on where he grew up. He lived with his family at 2 Orchard drive, Ashtead in surrey and went to the primary school there. The main reason I chose this kind of area is because it seems as though it's an area where he'd be financially well off and it's not that far from Epsom downs so it's a place he would realistically go to at some point to spark the initial craving for gambling. Also the fact he goes from growing up financially secure to what he ends up as would create more tragedy for me to portray in that first speech.

He first went to Epsom downs when he was 18 for a friends birthday and he put a small bet on even though it didn't thrill him all that much, it was only when he went back a couple more times it started to feel exciting to him.

He moved to a cheap flat in Lensbury way after losing his house to pay off the incident at Roberto's derby and that flat is only a couple miles from St Augustine's church of England church so it would be very likely that he'd be aware of and could have easy access to. The fact he could walk to it quite easily provides some convenience to help him get on the right track. These addresses/places are real and geographically correlate with the location of Epsom. The area is also close to where Miss Motrom Lives so they could easily see each-other if they wished.



16/3/17:

Today I developed my character's back story a little more adding by a few more specifics to him but also researched the psychology of compulsive gambling. I feel that may help me get into his head a little more, see if it backs up any assumptions I've made or can give me new ideas for how he should act.


I made up a few additional details such as:

- He was close to his parents and older sister, his dad was around since he was never drafted into world war II since he was considered too old and out of shape to be even considered. This meant he had a full family growing up and had a relativly good life. His father was an accountant so they were reasonably wealthy

- He has two favorite songs, one quality and the other he remembers fondly. The former is "I'm into Something Good" by Herman's hermits. This is a song that he just finds very catchy and memorable. it came out when he was about 21 and he's loved it ever since they heard it. The other song is "Roses are Red" by Bobby Vinton. This is a song that they both loved when they were dating and I even thought of them having a rendition of it playing at their wedding.


I was thinking if whether or not I could incorporate the letter into a scene such as when I scramble to get some money or betting slips out, I could find it and look at it briefly to give him a moment of conflict. I'm not overall familiar with those later scenes yet but I want to see if I can or just think if it would even work because while it would be very good for me, it may be too ambiguous and out of place for the audience.



Research:

Today I also did some research into the psychology of compulsive gambling or addiction in general. I had made assumptions about gambling addiction before because of the way it's depicted in media. What I found seems to back up my claims. I found an article from Psychology Today detailing the condition.

The basic psychology of the the addiction (as well as others such as drugs and alcohol of which the effects are very similar) is as follows. A chemical called dopamine is the chemical released whenever you do anything pleasurable or exciting, that could mean anything such as eating, sex or even gambling and drugs. It is released and if enough of it is released it can create a craving for more of it. However if you do something that releases a lot of dopamine, you have to wait a a long time for it to replenish, otherwise the next high time you do that activity, it won't be as satisfying or fulfilling. It may even just intentionally give out less since you've experienced it so much. This explains why so many gamblers make bigger and bigger bets as time goes on. They want to recapture the first time they did it. This makes perfect sense for Mr Tillotson. My initial thought was that he probably always puts generally the same amount of money on the races and that he only started getting really serious not too long before everything went down. However with this in mind the most logical decision for his addicted mind to make is to to just slowly up his bets every time.


The fact that his wife left him due to the addiction reaching dangerous levels is a very common occurrence, it can also result in people losing their jobs or their homes, which does happen to him in his backstory, both in the script and what I've made up.

The fact he also doesn't stop until it almost kills him is fairly realistic too, the article says "Unfortunately this realization normally only surfaces when a problem gambler hits rock bottom". People like this generally stay in a state of denial before reaching the bottom and finally trying to stop. That's how I feel it went down with Mr Tillotson and it's even confirmed in the script.

The article claims that for most male addicts, the addiction begging in adolescence, so me thinking that he got started around 18 or 19 was a fairly accurate estimate. This again means that by the time he's 30 or so that's when the addiction reaches it's peek and results in something horrible happening, if he were any older it would seem as though his escalation to that point takes too long.

A major symptom is that of becoming irritable when not gambling but thinking about it and I've definitely considered that for when he's with Miss Motrom, he's certainly uncomfortable while at the tracks since he knows he isn't allowed to bet and if he does it could end badly.

it explains why he would steal other peoples things to get more money to bet with. It's a very common thing that quite a few people have ended up in prison for.


17/3/17:

Today I took part in a hot seating exercise in which I had to explain the story of the letter Mr. Tillotson has and answer some questions about my character. I explained my backstory pretty well and it seemed to get a good reaction. I had thought up the backstory thoroughly, or so I thought. There were a couple of questions that hadn't occurred to me before and they were:

- Why did I get into religion? - The answer was simple, religion is often a place to turn to for recovering addicts since it has strict rules to follow for whatever their promised reward by although most people like this seem to follow it for self betterment.

- Why do I preach? - The most natural and logical thing that came to me was the idea of him wanting to help people. He knows how addictive it can be to weak minded people. His preaching scene with Miss Motrom is his attempt to stop other people making the same mistakes he did, whether or not using religion is the right thing is something he, himself is unsure about but it can get the job done.

- What is my relationship with Miss Motrom? - My relationship with her late in the play isn't too hard since we seem to get along and I show that I care for her but I didn't know how they were when initially meeting. I don't get the impression that they ever disliked each-other since they had a similar goal and working together would be ideal for them so I felt they've always had respect for each-other. I don't see anything romantic between them but they certainly are close in some capacity.

We rehearsed the Hugh and Jocks scene again and I still feel he isn't confrontational or angry enough. It's certainly more so than last time but I think while performing it, I was scared of being a tad over the top and unintentionally dialed back on the anger which didn't work that well. It's weird, I feel I'm starting to understand Hugh but I just need to experiment with how he acts a bit more. I have an emotional state for his as I've mentioned before but I just haven't performed it properly yet, it's still fairly downplayed and bland.

I was confused while performing because I had no idea what the line "Say you, bad, little Indian" meant. This made me think that Jocks is supposed to actually be Indian since Hugh also calls him Kemosabe. I looked up what that meant and apparently it's what Tonto calls the ranger in "The Lone Ranger". The only conclusion that I can come to is that he's saying it to assert some dominance in this scene since I believe in "The Lone Ranger" Tonto calls him this when explaining something or talking down to him, so from that perspective it would make sense.

A small development to my first scene with Miss Motrom scene is that I now put the sign down to give my monologue. Trying this out definitely allowed me to be more expressive. I noticed that through my body language I conveyed the sense of frustration and regret I had mentioned before, certainly better than I had previously. I'm able to show the moments where I'm remembering money by acting as if I'm holding it and then other moments where I can show my tragedy and frustration with my situation. So overall the speech went pretty well today with what I could remember and added quite a bit of passion to it.




18/3/17:

Today I  had the idea of recording my Mr tillostson fast speech to memorise it faster. I usually find I learn things faster when listening to them rather than reading them. It certainly took a while to record since I was reading it into the microphone and kept messing up but when it was done, I started listening to it over and over. I'm more or less certain this will help me learn it faster but we'll see.

Also, Chloe and I rang each-other to see if our backstories didn't have any glaring contradictions between them. Thankfully our stories seem to intertwine very well and the only things that really needed to be changed were the addresses of the churches and and make our houses closer together. I was surprised they synced up as well as they did.

Thinking about incorporating the letter again, I've come to the conclusion that to show it to the audience wouldn't make any sense since it's never mentioned and would be too vague for them to piece together what it is. I'm still keeping that back story element since I feel it really does suit him and adds some really relatable motivation to him, that's what's helping me be more expressive with him but showing it in the play wouldn't work unfortunately



Links:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/gambling-disorder-compulsive-gambling-pathological-gambling

https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200411/addiction-pay-attention

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-psychology-of-gambling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BTGgCEFuQw