Controlling Offers

This week's training we did some stuff with 'Controlling Offers', namely in the form of a game whereby any player called out on making a 'controlling' offer, would have to leave the stage. It was bizarre at first, I found it difficult to get my head around what a controlling offer was exactly.

But we persisted and it became clearer - basically when a player makes an offer so excruciatingly detailed that it basically robs their fellow player of the chance to add anything to the set-up. For instance, saying:

"Father O'Reilly, you must help me!" is a relatively uncontrolling offer.

Saying:

"Father O'Reilly, I've got these boils on my hands and I'm sure it's because I ignored your advice last Wednesday and decided to go to the brothel after all..." is, well, you get the idea.

I should stress here that Steve, our teacher, specified that a controlling offer is not necessarily always a bad thing, the exercise here was purely to explore what it is and how it affects the scene.

I found it really challenging putting this into practice, namely because trying NOT to control the scene (something which I struggle with at the best of times!) kinda led, on a few occasions, to being on-stage and knowing that the scene needed to go somewhere, but not wanting to control the other person, thus resulting - at least in my case - into a non-committal kind of mutual hesitation.

Anyway, there were a lot of other things that this exercise led into, which I'll divulge some other time, but I just wanted to throw the concept out there. Some interesting exercises:

- play with NOBODY allowed to make a controlling offer. If they do, they get buzzed off by the team.
- play with ONLY trying to make a controlling offer. The scene will probably be short (namely because you get the idea pretty quickly) but in my mind, once we did this exercise, everybody was on the same page with regards to what it actually means!