Status represents the difference in power between two or more characters. Playing with status during the rehearsal period can provide opportunities for interesting relationship dynamics to emerge, as well as ideas for blocking.

Get your actors to create a frozen image representing high status and then a second image representing low status.

• Discuss what it means externally and internally to be a high or low status.
• Discuss the different ways they occupied the space depending on if they were high or low status.

Next secretly give each actor a different number from 1-10, with 1 representing the lowest status and 10 representing the highest. Ask your actors to improvise a short scene but the only dialogue they can use is ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

• Have a quick discussion about how it felt.
• What number would they assign their fellow actor?
• What made them think this way?

Repeat the exercise above but this time tell your actors in secret what the other person’s status number is.

• Have a quick discussion about how it felt.
• Ask each actor to guess what number they thought they were
• Why did they feel that way? What was it about the way that people reacted to them that made them think they had a high or low number?

These exercises will give your actors a vocabulary of how to portray the status their character is feeling or made to feel.

You are now ready to try this out with your chosen text. Have a read of the text and discuss what the status of each character is at the beginning of the scene and where it shifts. Get your actors to perform the scene while keeping their status, and the way in which it shifts during the scene, in mind.