🎭 Year 9 Drama

Practitioners in depth, verbatim theatre, advanced acting, theatre design, and advanced devising.

Theatre Practitioners in Depth

Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938)

  • Russian director and actor. Founder of the systematic approach to acting training — the "Method".
  • The System: the actor must genuinely experience the character's emotions. Not surface imitation but internal truth.
  • Given circumstances: everything the playwright has specified about the world of the play (who, what, when, where, why). The actor must understand and believe them.
  • Magic if: "If I were in this situation..." — the actor's tool for imagining themselves into the character's world
  • Emotional memory (affective memory): recalling a real past emotion to fuel a character's emotional state. Later controversial — Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio version (Method acting) taken further by James Dean, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman.
  • Units and objectives: break the script into units (sections); each unit has a character's objective (what do they want right now?); the super-objective is what the character wants from the whole play.
  • The subtext: what lies beneath the words — what the character is really thinking and feeling, often different from what they say

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

  • German playwright and director. Developed Epic Theatre as an alternative to Stanislavski's illusionistic theatre.
  • Verfremdungseffekt (V-effekt / alienation effect): techniques that prevent the audience from becoming emotionally "absorbed" in the story, keeping them intellectually engaged and critically aware
  • V-effekt techniques: direct audience address (actors speaking to the audience), visible stage machinery, placards and titles announcing scenes, songs that interrupt the narrative, actors commenting on their characters, gestus (a physical action that embodies a social attitude or relationship)
  • Brecht wanted audiences to think about the social conditions depicted, not just feel for the characters — theatre as a tool for social change
  • Key plays: "Mother Courage and Her Children", "The Good Person of Szechwan", "Life of Galileo", "The Caucasian Chalk Circle"
  • In performance: deliberate theatricality, non-naturalistic staging, multi-role playing, music that makes statements

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)

  • French playwright and theorist. Developed the Theatre of Cruelty — not about physical cruelty but a cruelty to the audience's sensibilities, forcing an intense, visceral experience.
  • Rejected the dominance of the playwright's text. Wanted theatre to be a physical, spatial, sensory event — like a plague that infects the audience.
  • Influence: environmental theatre, immersive theatre, Punchdrunk (Secret Cinema), physical theatre
  • Theatre of Cruelty techniques: no proscenium arch (audience surrounded by performance), extreme soundscapes, unusual lighting, non-verbal vocalisations, large-scale movement

Verbatim Theatre

What Is Verbatim Theatre?

  • Verbatim theatre: plays created from interviews and research. The actual words spoken by real people are used as the script — verbatim (word for word).
  • Also called: documentary theatre, tribunal theatre, oral history theatre
  • Raises fundamental questions: whose voices are heard? Whose stories get told? How does staging real speech change its meaning?

Key Verbatim Companies and Works

  • Tricycle Theatre (now Kiln Theatre): tribunal plays recreating public inquiries using transcripts. "The Colour of Justice" (Lawrence Inquiry), "Bloody Sunday".
  • DV8 Physical Theatre / Lloyd Newson: "Can We Talk About This?" — about freedom of speech, Islam, and multiculturalism. Verbatim text delivered while performing complex physical theatre.
  • Anna Deavere Smith: American performer who interviews hundreds of people about a social crisis and then performs all their voices herself. "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" (LA riots). Questions about race, voice, and representation.
  • "The Laramie Project" (Moisés Kaufman): about the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard. Interview-based; the community of Laramie, Wyoming tells its own story.

Creating Verbatim Work

  • Interviewing: build trust, ask open questions, don't put words in the interviewee's mouth, listen actively
  • Selecting and editing: you cannot use everything — selection is itself a form of authorship and carries ethical responsibility
  • Performance approach: should you imitate the real person (accent, mannerisms, appearance) or create a representational version? Both are valid — each raises different questions.
  • Ethical considerations: consent, accuracy, representation, potential for harm to subjects

Advanced Acting Skills

Characterisation in Depth

  • Biography: create a detailed backstory for your character — childhood, relationships, formative experiences — even for details not in the play. This informs how the character behaves in ways the text doesn't specify.
  • Status: every interaction involves status negotiation — who has higher status and how does it shift? Status is not fixed by social position alone; it is actively performed (eye contact, pace of speech, use of space, interruption).
  • Hot-seating: sit in character and answer questions from other actors/audience as your character. Tests the depth and consistency of your characterisation.
  • Thought tracking: pausing the action to voice a character's internal thoughts. Reveals the gap between subtext and text.

The Voice

  • Projection: filling the space with sound without straining. Supported by breath from the diaphragm.
  • Diction and articulation: clear consonants, especially final consonants. Avoid swallowing ends of words.
  • Pace: varying speed for effect. Slow down for importance; speed up for urgency, panic, or comedy.
  • Pitch variation: monotone delivery is the enemy of engagement. Use pitch to emphasise, question, express emotion.
  • Resonance: the richness and warmth of the voice. Developed through voice exercises and relaxation.

The Body

  • Gesture: deliberate movements that communicate. Avoid unmotivated gesture (nervous fidgeting). Every movement should mean something.
  • Proxemics: the use of space between people. Intimate (0–45cm), personal (45cm–1.2m), social (1.2–3.6m), public (3.6m+). The distances between characters on stage communicate their relationships.
  • Stage levels: standing, sitting, crouching, lying. Changes in level create visual interest and communicate power dynamics.
  • Stillness: the ability to be completely still on stage without tension. Stillness draws focus; restlessness dissipates it.

Theatre Design

The Role of the Designer

  • Theatre design includes: set design, costume design, lighting design, sound design — all must serve the production's concept
  • All design choices communicate meaning: a bare stage with a single chair means something different from a realistic kitchen set
  • Designers work collaboratively with the director, usually from a common production concept or vision

Stage Configurations

  • Proscenium arch: the "picture frame" stage. Audience on one side; clear separation between performers and audience. Allows elaborate scenic illusions. Traditional theatre format.
  • Thrust stage: the stage extends into the audience, surrounded on three sides. Creates more intimacy; audience can see each other across the space.
  • In-the-round: the audience surrounds the performance space on all sides. Maximum intimacy; no "upstage" or hiding behind sets. Requires actors to constantly move to share their performance with all sides.
  • Traverse: two banks of audience face each other with the performance space between them, like a catwalk. Creates an alleyway effect.
  • Site-specific/immersive: performance in a non-theatrical location chosen for its inherent meaning (Punchdrunk, National Theatre's "War Horse" barn tours). Audience may move through the space.

Lighting Design

  • Functions: visibility, mood, atmosphere, focus, time of day, location
  • Colour: warm gels (amber, straw) for naturalistic interior warmth; cool gels (blue, lavender) for night, cold, supernatural; mixed for more complex moods
  • Angle: front light (flat, naturalistic); top light (dramatic, isolating); side light (sculpts the body, used in dance); backlighting (creates silhouette, suggests mystery or entrances)
  • LX rig: the arrangement of lanterns in the theatre. Fresnel (soft edge, good for washes), profile spot (hard edge, precise, good for gobos — shaped patterns), LED par (colour-mixing without gels)
  • Gobos: metal or glass discs that project patterns (e.g. dappled leaves, broken glass, stars) onto the stage or set

Advanced Devising

From Stimulus to Theatre

  • A stimulus is the starting point for devised work. A photograph, a poem, an object, a news story, a piece of music, a social issue — anything that sparks ideas.
  • The key is responding creatively rather than illustratively: a photograph of a crowd does not mean your devised piece should be about crowds — it might be about loneliness, or anonymity, or the individual vs the collective
  • Allow multiple responses before committing to a direction. The best devised work often comes from an unexpected angle.

Structure and Form

  • Episodic structure: a series of scenes that are not necessarily chronological or causally linked, unified by a theme or perspective. Useful for devised work exploring a complex issue.
  • Circular structure: the ending returns to the beginning, but with different meaning because of everything that has happened in between
  • Montage: juxtaposing contrasting images, scenes, or perspectives. Creating meaning through collision rather than narrative.
  • Multi-strand narrative: following several storylines simultaneously, often used to show a theme from different perspectives (e.g. a community affected by a disaster)

The Devising Portfolio

  • Document the process: photos of rehearsals, notes on decisions made and why, ideas considered and rejected
  • Include: early experiments, what worked, what failed and what you learned, how the stimulus influenced decisions, how you incorporated practitioner approaches
  • Evaluating: be honest about what didn't work — process documentation should show genuine thinking, not a sanitised account of smooth progress