As Excited As A Really Excited Person Who's Got A Special Reason To Be Excited

I used to love doing drama at school. Just remember your lines, remember where to stand, and deliver the words in as booming and penetrating a voice as you can manage at the age of twelve. Squint your eyes up a lot so people think you're really serious. Emphasise the frowning brow. Don't let your bedsheet toga fall off, or worry about two scheming Roman Senators wearing bright red football socks instead of sandals.
Really don't forget your lines.
One time during an ambitiously grandiose Nativity set inside the inn, I was the innkeeper/ringmaster (there really really really wasn't any room, what with the wind band, the dancers, poem reciters, choir and a smattering of dubiously shaped cardboard Bethlehemian props) and I forgot to usher in a girl called Catherine for her flute solo.

She would have nothing to do with me until I jokingly apologised for the omission ten years later when we were both drunk in a nightclub and I thought things had gone on for long enough. I've even had one of life's memorable moments on stage.

Anyway. I'm in a play at the moment, and rehearsals are a real eye-opener. Last summer Krissa and I were a part of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and my part was small enough to get away with my early-teen acting technique - while the rest of the cast reeled off staggering performances, I merely said my lines and did a bit of staggering. But this year there is no escape - I have to learn.

Communicable Arts, just as last year, has a great cast (list and photographic goodness here), and because my part is larger I have more rehearsals, which means that I've seen these guys (and girls) try on their characters like clothes...change them, flip them, try new things, experiment with the people they're becoming through the words. It's incredible.
And slowly, from the steady and automatic office body language I walk in with at 6.30, I've started doing it myself, or trying to.
I'm always unsure if I'm pulling something off, or, if I do something that works once (laughs from the scattered seats around the auditorium are a good indicator) I go nuts trying to remember just what it was I did for the next time.

It's difficult - the consistency, anyway.
'Getting into character' is a cliched phrase, but I think, once the actions for scenes and the canter of the lines works, those are the characters, that's the dynamic, right there, and it's like a flavour, or a colour, that sits on the words in the script over and above their dry meanings. It's an extra dimension to the already evocative vista of Shakespeare; the difference between the mental images of reading and the spectacle of acting.

So I play two dukes. One, the younger of the two, is a right bastard, one of the villains of the piece - in the best theatrical tradition played by the only Brit on the cast. He has taken the title from his elder brother and banished him. In some ways growling my way through the lines as a bastard is easier than the flip side: I also play the elder exiled brother, who hangs out in the forest and thinks that a poor forester's life, with the absence of warmth, plumbing and politics, is jolly marvellous.
At the moment my 'characters' are:

Bad Duke Fred: A coarsely cobbled and poorly executed amalgam of every growling villain from the Sheriff of Nottingham to my old music teacher on a bad day...hi Mr. Malia, how's the googling going?

Good/Dippy Duke Senior: Hugh Laurie's Lieutenant George from Blackadder Goes Forth, or as close as I can get while constantly using the word 'hadst'.
My lip wobble needs work.