The show must go on… but who am I ghosting with that one?

Well, we managed to get the videos of actors saying the ‘Seven Ages’ speech (including John Gielgud, Benedict Cumberbatch, Morgan Freeman, as well as others) and merge them into one over lapping video, though not for as much of the speech as we initially intended. We fitted in the words from the speech into our script, though again not as we initially hoped for of having the whole speech in but we still managed to get some in. And we even managed to create a slide to highlight that we used these words, though we couldn’t get it to float in as originally hoped. All the same though, we had managed to achieve what we had hoped.

Through rehearsing for this naturally mistakes were made and corrected as we went. We became tired and exhausted through all the running around. Sometimes we couldn’t find the correct cardboard to match what we were talking about. This was our rehearsal process, and we wanted to ghost it, we wanted to ghost ourselves in our own performance.

We added in to our script the mistakes we made within the rehearsals, we picked up cardboard with both Booker and Carlson on when quoting one or the other as if unsure of which it really was. When we mentioned Sir Ian McKellan and Sir Patrick Stewart Kyle and Lauren should hold up their names on the cardboard but were either too tired to or couldn’t find them. While frantically running around the set, I slipped and fell on the cardboard and Lauren would be so exhausted she would miss her cue. And Kyle even had the script with him through the performance as if a rehearsing rather than fully performing.

Fig i: List of cardboard titles   Fig ii: Highlighted script with mistakes and cardboard instructions

One final way in which ghosting was incorporated into this performance was simply we were the final performance of the day. For which the previous two performances were regarding ghosting. One featured information on The National Theatre’s production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, as did we. One featured cardboard signs in reference to Forced Entertainment, as did we. They were all performed in the same studio of the same building. As we performed, the audience may very well have been thinking of the previous performances regarding any of these factors. We were haunting not only ourselves from our rehearsals but also our other students but doing similar topics in a similar style in the same venue. Ghosting is in everything. Goodnight.

 Fig iii: Post show rest

Work Cited

Fig i: Marshall, A. (2017).

Fig ii: Marshall, A. (2017).

Fig iii: Higgin,s K. (2017).