Nuts by Tom Topor

Nuts is a play set in 1979. It is a play set in a courtroom in the psychiatric wing of Bellevue hospital in New York, and is about a young high class girl named Claudia draper, who is indicated for manslaughter after killing a client in self defence. There are many problems indicated throughout the play such as manslaughter and sexual abuse. In the 1970’s sexual abuse was taboo, it was looked down upon and many people where ashamed, this made my character feel isolated and guilty.

Mental health is mentioned in the play and in the 70’s it wasn’t talked about a lot because many people where ashamed. I plan to play the character of Claudia. To prepare myself for the role. I decided to do some hot seating which let me get to know my character a lot more and challenged me to stay in character, from doing this I learnt that Claudia is upset with her parents for being ashamed of her and I also learnt that she doesn’t really care anymore but she knows that they still love her.

To explore my character more I decided to go through the monologue and write an adverb after sentence to find the meaning for example. ‘’ I know that love is too much and not enough’’ The adverb I wrote was sorrowfully this helped me with the tone of my voice because throughout my monologue I was mainly shouting but when I got to this line i felt emotion when I said it quite quiet, almost like the character had given up, and it helped me with my pace as i seemed to put a pause in which made it more believable.

I want my character to come across as angry but with a sense of fragility so to show this for example on the line ‘’ when I was a little girl I used to say to her I love you to the moon and back again… ‘’ I am going to look as though I am thinking about the past but then on the line ‘’ what went wrong? ‘’ I am going to make eye contact with the audience and make the pace of the line faster to show that I am furious.