Woman Alone - costume and makeup

For this piece, costume and makeup has been something we have thought about in detail for a few weeks. Because of the very visual style of Berkoff's drama, it is very important to us that these elements perfectly compliment our piece: accentuating our facial expressions and physical movements as well as fitting the character of Susan and helping to define her sub-personalities.

 Our initial idea was to have the faces of each personality the same and then have different costumes to differentiate the emotion they represent but we then thought that the face is such an expressive part of the body that it would make much more sense for us to do it the other way round. Therefore, the audience can see that we are the same person by our clothes and can clearly see our characteristics by the expressions painted onto our faces. The face paint will act as a mask that represents the emotion.

Below are a few different examples of Berkoff style makeup:

I think this way of accentuating the natural facial expressions in quite a simple way is really effective and creates a very visually interesting image. It also adds an element of uniformity, so would work well in portraying that we are the same character.  However, in a similar way, each character is not very clearly defined so might be difficult for the audience to differentiate the sub-personalities, especially if we have the same costume. It also makes the face look older so maybe we could use this style for the older, motherly sub-personality.

This is a picture of the makeup from a production of Berkoff's 'Lunch'. I think we could definitely take some of the elements of the males face paint for Holly's character (the angry, psychotic personality), especially the heavy pointed eyebrows and the lined eyes as they suit her emotions. We could also use the woman's face for inspiration when doing the makeup for mine and Charlotte's character's as they are the most feminine. The drawn on eyelashes definitely signify a flirty, feminine aspect to her personality, as do the raised eyebrows and rosy cheeks. 

Here is an image of Susan from a production of Woman Alone and we can see clearly that her depressive, psychotic personality is being shown. The streaks of makeup down her face show how her inner emotions have affected her outward appearance very well so it would be good if we did something similar for the psychotic personality. 

Below are some ideas for costume and hair. In the opening stage directions it states that she is in night wear and both of these examples have stood to that instruction. We are thinking of doing something similar as well. When we were deliberating whether to keep the costume or makeup the same, we were considering having us all wear different styles of pyjamas (so the mother personality would wear fitted flannel pyjamas with all the buttons done up and the sexual one would wear a silky nighty or dressing gown etc). But we didn't think this would be clear enough so we have decided to buy a silky pyjama top/nighty to be worn with leggings. 

In these images, the woman has curlers in her hair, this wouldn't be very practical for our performance of woman alone due to the intense physical aspect of it but it does work very well for her character. It also adds an element of irony as she conforms to the societal norm that women have to spend a lot of time making their appearance 'beautiful' for the outside world yet this woman is locked inside her house so the outside world will never see her. 

Here are some images of us experimenting with different ideas for the psychotic and sexual characters.

  This was our original idea, but it was pointed out to us that Holly's facial expressions will be lost very easily with this makeup and we should probably make lighter tears falling down the face and thinner lines around the eye but accentuate the eyebrows and mouth.
                                                     


 This shows how we took some of the aspects of the makeup from the man in 'Lunch' and added them to our original idea to create a more effective image.






I experimented at home with lipstick and blusher as I didn't have access to face paints.

 This was my initial idea for the sexual character as the pink/red colour clearly symbolises a flirtatious, promiscuous personality. 

I then tried a more realistic version if the blusher and extended the lips as we did with Holly's makeup, this doesn't have the same effect for my character and makes her look more psychotic or even childlike, rather than mature and sexually experienced.

Here is an example of experimenting with the drawn on eyelashes idea from the 'Lunch' image. This element might work better on Charlotte's character as it is more subtle.










Because lengthening the mouth didn't work very well, I tried to make the lips look fuller and thicker which definitely works better.

Here are some images from the performance and beforehand in which you can see exactly how we used makeup, hair and costume to create effect.