Salim's Day

In Acting technique we explored living in the day of the character to help understand our roles better, this would help me to inhabit the space, understand the character and feel more comfortable with my character. This is what I thought Salims "average" day would consist of :

• Wake up
• Check on mum (implied she is quite ill in the text)
• Make myself and mum breakfast
• Get ready
• Leave My house
• go on the "block"
• meet friends
• go to the "trap"
• prepare drugs for sale
• go to camden 
• message "clients" about the drugs
• meet potential contacts and sell
• go back to the "trap"
• chill and smoke 
• go mosque (maybe) 
• chill more 
• maybe sell more
• go home

Inspiration

While working on on Frontline, I found working on my character wasn't  too difficult as I have encountered people that are similar to him in different ways, meaning the character wasn't too difficult to connect with and I was confident that I could work with this character. I established from very early that I did not want to make my character a caricature and use him simply for laugh ans I feel that is often the route that is chosen and that is the easy way of portraying the character.

These for me are examples of types of characters that I wanted to stay away from, as I felt that they were more stereotypes as opposed to honest representations of youth today. Although my character is a stereotypes of sorts, I wanted to help people to see that there is more to these people than just violence and drugs, even if that is the image only they help paint for themselves

Salim and Mahmoud

Towards the end of the play Salim has a scene with Mahmoud where he calls Salim over and discusses his history and Marmite with him. I found this scene intriguing at first as I read the scene a few times to try and figure out why the scene happened and the apparent relationship between the two. Due to the nature of the conversation I wondered if the two might of known each other. I came to the conclusion that the two knew each only by face and not by anything else. The thing that stuck with me after reading the scene a few times, is the trust/respect that Salim seems to have for Mahmoud, as throughout the play he is the only character that lowers his "defensive barrier" for. This is almost spelled out for the audience as in the same scene Erkenwald attempts to speak to him in the same manner, but when he mentions Salim's mum, Salim goes berserk and shuts down any attempt to speak on even ground with him. After doing the scene a couple times with Mahmoud, I began to be able to establish a character relationship that I could not get from the text alone. At first I found myself trying to concious of everything he said and react to everything to try and form a relationship, which worked to a degree with the scene , but I personally didn't feel that it was honest enough. After a while of trying different things I decided that in order for me to feel more in touch and honest with the scene, I would try to imagine how I would honestly react to the situation by honestly doing what Salim did and and try to take in only the stuff aimed at Salim. and zone out during the rest of his speech about Marmite and other things. This allowed me to honestly react and laugh at things he was saying in the speech as I realised that some of what he was saying actually had meaning, some of it was actually ridiculous and that I was allowed to laugh at the things that were said. This helped allow me to feel more "free" on stage and work with the scene a bit more. After making that change, it helped me to understand the "father figure" he represents to me within the scene, with somalia and Islam being our common factor.