JOIN THE DRAMAWISE COMMUNITY

DramawiseR: Your guide to the world beyond the book

Try to shorten ‘Dramawise Reimagined’ and you get ‘DramawiseR’. We think

that after thirty years working with the elements of drama, we’re
dramawiser than ever. To celebrate this, we’re building an online
community for teachers. Want to tell us how Dramawise Reimagined is
used in your classroom? Seeking advice on a particular play, element or
theme? Interested in new drama activities and teacher’s resources? The
DramawiseR website will give you free access to:
Extra information about the book
A live blog with updates from Haseman and O’Toole
Upcoming workshops and a workshop request form
Bonus resources, updated with new information and current concepts

This community is open to all. It will change and adapt according to the
world around us, becoming a network of resources for the elements of
drama.

The DramawiseR world is also Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram.

introduction
This book is about the stuff of drama: how it works, why we do it and how
it allows us to dream and to act in the world. Drama, with its public face
theatre, is one of the world’s oldest arts and is present in all cultures. Thirty
years ago, in the first edition of this book, we showed what it was to be
Dramawise, to recognise that all dramas are made up of the same
elements and structures. We set those elements out in an order where they
could be explored simply and clearly through dramatic action. This book
revisits those elements, reframes them for twenty-first century education and
reimagines them for contemporary students like you.
Though we work primarily through the dramatic process, this is also a
journey into the world of drama, in all its specialised traditions, practices
and language. Encountering this new language need not be daunting; all
specialised terms are well defined in the text.
One of the greatest recent changes in school drama since we first
published Dramawise is the creation of the Australian Curriculum: Arts,
where for the first time Drama becomes an entitlement for all Australian
children. All students from Foundation to Year 6 can now expect to be at
least introduced to the basics of drama, and have the opportunity to study
drama at secondary school. The elements of drama are central to the way
this curriculum is designed to convey dramatic knowledge, skills and
techniques. Many of you will be studying for the Australian Curriculum.
Whether you are, or whether you’re studying drama under some other
auspice, building your knowledge and skills in the elements of drama is
the way to go.

Specialist drama terms are in bold

text on the page where they are
defined. These terms are also
listed as bold in the index.

The model of the elements of dramatic form here provides the key to this
book. There is a chapter devoted to each element and once you have
developed an understanding of that element through improvisation, we
include extracts from well-known playtexts, illustrating the element in action
on stage, as a further challenge for you. When you have learned to
manage all the elements, we deliver the process over to you in the last
chapter to make your own plays.
We have written this book according to the fundamentals of good
drama teaching. Primarily, learning arises through action. Practical
workshops, improvisation, process drama and theatre texts introduce and
then amplify your understanding of the key concepts of drama. As you will
discover, process drama is an improvised form of drama in which you
construct a coherent dramatic story with yourselves as the characters in
that story. It is a powerful way to explore, through experience, all of the
elements of drama. This approach brings your mind, body, emotions,
imagination and memories into the classroom to shape and deepen your
learning. This is not a textbook aimed solely at your brain!
As you orchestrate your growing knowledge of drama you will create
works that matter, that will amuse, affirm, perhaps unsettle and excite you
as they deal with themes of consequence. And if our topics don’t work for
you and your classmates, select your own and apply the Dramawise
exercises to those. Learning in and through drama works best when the
action is co-created, which means you are placed at the centre of learning
—with this book, your teacher and the resources of the world at your
fingertips.
Each chapter explores one of the elements of drama and we strongly
recommend that they be followed sequentially. Practical activities and
teaching text are alternated within each chapter, with one leading to the
other, so that theoretical understanding grows alongside practice. We
hope you can work quite autonomously and even manage many of the
activities largely by yourselves.
The practical activities are easily identified by the blue dotted line
running beside the activity text. The more complicated drama activities are
broken up according to the following headings:
Preliminaries (what needs to be done before the activity or
improvisation can begin)
Situation (what the activity or improvisation is about)
Roles (the people or characters involved)
Constraints (particulars that the players have to take into account)
 Management (how the activity or improvisation will be organised and
conducted)
Outcome (how it will end—if that is known in advance)
Reflection (activities to distil understanding, which usually follow the
improvisation).
In some chapters, we have devised quite complex process dramas,
complete in themselves, and in other chapters we use these dramas as
touchstones and points of reference. We hope that they will be useful
exemplars for other process dramas that you may create. In these key
dramas the associated activities are configured as ‘scenes’ as is
appropriate in any serious drama.
Some adults prefer to think that young people learn best by sitting still
and listening quietly to absorb the lessons of their elders. We believe
differently. In our experience, once young people know how to manage
the elements of drama with heads, hearts and bodies, they regularly offer
imaginative insights into the world which outshine traditional adult
thinking. We wish you well in your learning quest to be dramawise and
world-wise.
notes for teachers
This sequenced and structured book is actually about autonomy for the
student. We want to give young people the tools of the trade so they can
approach drama with the freedom and confidence of understanding, using
the tools that artists (and teachers) often reserve for themselves. You will
not find ‘skits’ in these pages, although you will find plenty of action. The
theoretical underpinning emerges through activity that is significant, not
trivial. Fun certainly, but purposeful fun.
The Australian Curriculum: the Arts comprises Dance, Drama, Media
Arts, Music and Visual Arts. In the Drama section of the Curriculum, the
first component of essential knowledge is defined under the heading, ‘The
elements of drama’:
The elements of drama work dynamically together to create and focus
dramatic action and dramatic meaning.
Both Making and Responding involve developing practical and
critical understanding of how the elements of drama can be used to
shape and structure drama that engages audiences and
communicates meaning. Learning in drama is based on two
fundamental building blocks: the elements of drama and the ways that
narrative shapes and structures dramatic action. The elements of
drama work dynamically together to create and focus dramatic action
and dramatic meaning. Dramatic action is shaped by dramatic
tension, space and time, and mood and atmosphere to symbolically
present and share human experiences for audiences.

This definition was directly influenced by our model of the elements of

drama in the first edition of Dramawise, which is further developed in this
book to include the element of narrative and the elements of theatre.
The Curriculum, unlike the book, defines character and contrast as
separate elements. We have expanded our definitions of character and
role as components of the broader element of the human context (Chapter
1). Three dramatically significant contrasts identified by Dorothy
Heathcote, a UK pioneer of drama education, are light/darkness,
movement/stillness and sound/ silence. These seem to us to be
components of that empty space that is made special for drama, and we
deal with them in Chapter 4.
Expository text has been used judiciously. While we work primarily
through the dramatic process—through improvisation, process drama and
workshopping playtexts—we believe in taking students into the world of
drama, into its specialised language, traditions and practices. Thus we
have occasionally elaborated on certain plays, historical facts and
definitions to embed students’ learning in the larger wisdom of our various
drama tribes. This also allows this book to serve a wider audience,
dealing with fundamentals for junior secondary school learners while
cultivating more nuanced and complex understandings for older students.
We consider that a very significant function of the art form of drama is
the exploration of important and sometimes contentious issues. The
contexts of drama (and the contexts we have chosen) are in one sense
arbitrary—the same elements are always present whatever the subject
matter. As mastery of these elements develops, students will be empowered
to raise their own issues through drama and sharpen both their drama
skills and their own critical thinking.

Using this book

In order to foster a deeply integrated knowledge about this creative and
disciplined art, Dramawise Reimagined is developmental. We recommend
that it be worked through sequentially rather than dipped into, beginning
with Chapter 1. The sequence of activities provides practical learning
opportunities for students and teachers, and it is essential that you have a
clear idea of the design and purpose of each activity before introducing it
to the students. You will need to make judgements about time allocations
too. While some activities may last five minutes, some sequences may be
good for a fifty-minute lesson and whole chapters may take up to five
weeks.
Activities can be set up by you or by the students, although those
activities which become major dramas will be strengthened if you take on
a role and enter the action. Your enthusiasm and willingness to participate
helps create a flourishing atmosphere for drama.
The activities in this book have been used successfully with a large
number of students in a wide range of teaching situations, so we know
from experience that they work. However, if a set of activities or a drama
fails to interest your students, then you may seek or devise a more suitable
alternative. Many teachers—and students—will have their own favourite
activities and playtexts which they may wish to substitute. The conceptual
framework of this book can be readily applied to any such materials.

Managing the action for learning

As a teacher of drama you will know that it is managed differently from
many other subjects. These differences present challenges in a number of
respects.

Warm-up games and activities

Drama sessions of all kinds—process dramas, rehearsals for plays and
even pre-performance preparations—often start with games and warm-up
activities. These are useful, but they are not compulsory and sometimes are
not needed at all. For example, in our Drugs in Sport drama (Chapter 3)
we do not start with warm-up exercises; in our Refugee Family drama
(Chapter 4) we do. In the latter case, a game is used to introduce one of
the main drama conventions— ‘frozen images’—that we use throughout
the book. The trick is always to find or adapt a game that introduces and
creates a focus for the theme or the human context of the drama.
Starting with a game or an exercise can help achieve the optimum
energy level for productive work, or for focused attention and
concentration. In fact, the common phrase ‘warm-up’ can be misleading. It
may indeed be to warm up physically on a cold day, or to raise the
energy level, perhaps for a session after lunch. On the other hand, if the
students are over excited for some reason, cooling down may be what’s
needed. Rather than pre-plan these activities, therefore, it is better to have
them at your fingertips for when they are necessary.

Group size, composition and direction

Drama demands a lot of group work, in groups varying from pairs to half
the class. We have usually recommended a specific group size for the
most effective management of a particular activity. When your class
numbers don’t fit the size we recommend, you need to reorganise speedily
and appropriately: extras might be assigned to existing groups, observers
included to document what happens, group size modified up or down and
so on.
There are some basic ground rules for managing groups of various sizes
in practical activities. It pays to establish conventions that the students
automatically recognise and follow. These include:
finding and delineating their own individual or group spaces;
quickly and quietly moving furniture or rostra for scene-setting;
basic configurations for discussion, such as sitting in a circle or in
front of a ‘talk chair’—taken by teacher or a student to lead out-of-role
discussions.
When managing practical activities with the whole class it is helpful for the
teacher to adopt a sequence of directions which students recognise and
follow. Much of the success of practical drama work depends on how
crisply you begin and end activities. When starting an activity involving all
the students simultaneously, you need a way to cue them all in together, for
instance: ‘Find a space … on a count … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … Action!’
Similarly, when you need to cut the action, establish a cue that they will all
recognise and respond to immediately, even if they are heavily engaged.
Finally, we have written this book as drama teachers. As teachers, you
understand that at times in drama tensions of mystery and surprise are best
built by deliberately withholding a plot twist or confidential information
from students. But the linear logic of the book, especially one written for
students, sometimes makes it difficult to achieve this, for the students can
simply read ahead and spot the surprise. At such times you can explain
the merit of not reading ahead, which will probably guarantee that some
will; if that is the case, ask those who do know what lies ahead to keep it
to themselves.

The urge to ‘act’

In the improvisations, role-plays and process dramas in this book it is
important to discuss with students how they can participate most
constructively. They do not need to ‘act’ any differently from their real
selves, even if playing an older or younger person. They need to adopt the
status and attitude they think the character would have, and then play the
role naturally. It will be easier for the other participants, too, to concentrate
on the dramatic problem seriously, rather than struggle to deal with
somebody acting with funny voices and walks. They can use their own real
names (easier to remember), unless those are culturally inapt or they have
to swap gender, in which case encourage them to choose a common
name that’s easy to remember, not a jokey one.
Students will frequently find themselves playing characters of the
opposite sex, even in a mixed school class, so it is important to get them
used to it right from the start, by taking it for granted as a given. Getting
your students— especially if new to drama—to take their roles seriously
will depend on two factors in your control. If the drama whets their
interest, and they can see that the tasks and activities have a serious
purpose, they will be more interested in co-operating than in fooling. In
addition, you will be showing that you take the activities seriously if you
explain their purpose clearly and get into them quickly and efficiently.
Taking part in some of the games and activities yourself is a valuable
strategy for modelling your own engagement in the drama. You will find
plenty of opportunities to use the technique of teacher-in-role, and in two
of the embedded process dramas we have structured a scene where this
would strengthen the drama considerably.
As a postscript, don’t forget that laughter is often an important part of
the lesson, especially in releasing tension, or reflected on games and
activities. Drama should be fun.

Pre-texts for action

Process dramas always need a pre-text to launch dramatic action. Good
pre-texts do more than simply arouse interest in a topic, as for instance, a
‘stimulus’ like a piece of music or a news article may. A simple stimulus
may kindle interest but it is seldom sufficient to launch a drama that opens
up rich possibilities for groups and audiences to test their own attitudes
and beliefs and to extract meanings. An effective pre-text, like any
powerful first scene of a play, stirs participants and audiences to know
more about the situation, the characters and how things may end for them.

Importing the world

Just as new media has brought profound changes to all the performing
arts, new technologies and networked capabilities are offering drama
education fresh challenges and opportunities. One opportunity comes with
the ability to import drama on screens into every connected classroom. To
illustrate, in Chapter 6 there is a set of exercises on Shakespeare’s famous
‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech from As You Like It. At the time of writing it is
possible to download 2290 renditions of that monologue from YouTube
alone. This presents an unmatched opportunity for you to curate these vast
numbers in ways that can personalise and particularise learning according
to the interests and abilities of your students. Our selection from those
2290 was not random; we had two good reasons, of culture and timing,
which we explain in that chapter. By welcoming technological innovation
and access to the world’s archives we can literally ‘match the action to the
word and the word to the action’ in our drama education.

Assessment
Educational systems require drama teachers to judge the quality of student
work. As we do so, care needs to be taken to use assessment techniques
and criteria which are neither irksome nor destructive to our art. Exactly
what we assess is a matter of significance too.
The key to assessing drama, as in most assessment, is to find clear and
recognisable criteria. Within the massively complex event that is any
human social interaction, particular and tangible components can be the
object of focus, can feature in the task and be identified for assessment. In
other words, decide exactly what you are looking for, set the drama
activity up so that will be evident, then decide how you are going to rate
its degree of accomplishment.
The Australian Curriculum: Arts provides some helpful pointers to start
with. Although it purposely does not deal with assessment, the content
descriptors are designed to begin this process of singling out criteria,
explicitly and implicitly. This basic categorisation of content is useful even
if you are not working to the Australian Curriculum.
Each two-year band level has its own set of content descriptors and
elaborations (the drama knowledge considered necessary to be
understood at that level). These are not haphazardly arranged. The whole
curriculum has two basic principles for organising content: making (as
artist) and responding (as audience). Implicitly in the drama curriculum,
making is further defined in terms of:
a. creating and generating
b. shaping and producing
c. presenting and performing
In the primary years’ curriculum, these three steps in making lead naturally
into responding which is our fourth descriptor. Together these provide a
useful basis for developing distinct criteria for each of the four categories.
By the secondary years, the curriculum recognises that the functions
involved in making and understanding complex drama are not really so
conveniently separate. The content descriptors have thus been expanded
and are more diffuse and interwoven, though still essentially follow that
sequence. These content descriptors can be applied to all the activities in
this book, from the simplest to the most complex, to provide specific
criteria for assessment.
A question that was able to be asked when we first wrote Dramawise
—‘Should we assess drama at all, and is it even possible?’—has in the
intervening years been put to rest. Schools, programs and syllabuses
round Australia have for many years now been coming up with effective
and proven forms of assessment. This is certainly true for performance
work—those activities and challenges that in this book mostly fall under the
heading of ‘And in Plays’—and it is also true for responding, where the
demands of critical analysis and drama knowledge can be assessed
through conventional written forms.
This book does not provide a guide to the assessment of theatre, so if
you do not know anything about summative assessment of dramatic
performance and response, you should consult the relevant syllabuses and
programs for help. Alternatively you could contact your state drama
teachers’ association (Drama Australia’s local organisations are active,
knowledgeable and keen to assist new recruits to drama teaching).

Assessing process work

Assessing work in process, and especially in process dramas, poses more
subtle challenges. Trying to make judgements on an individual’s felt
response and personal emotional growth is inherently problematic: we
could find ourselves failing students because they are poor examples of
themselves! Students need to participate with integrity, and we need to
base our judgements on the effective expression, management of the
elements and control of the medium demonstrated by the students.
A range of techniques can be used to assess the different aspects of a
student’s process work. The first step is to embed documentation tasks
within the drama. Much information can be gleaned about students’
emotional engagement and their intellectual understanding from reflective
writing following the drama work, and even more from in-role writing and
commentary embedded within the drama work itself.
A journal or a blog is a must, where students can reflect and document
their responses. Initially you will need to provide help with writing journal
entries. For many, the ability to reflect is a developed skill, not a natural
aptitude, and this is particularly true for beginning learners. Give students
specific questions that address the things that are important for them to
understand from the drama: questions about the drama work itself, about
the element in focus, about their performance and handling of that
element, about the drama work in practice. Throughout the book, we have
included suggestions and advice on how to embed and include reflective
and documentation tasks, in-role and out-of-role. Reflection does not have
to be only in written prose form. You can gain insights into your students’
learning from more personal responses, and contributions of a poetic,
artistic or multimedia nature.
To assess documentation is not in itself sufficient, however. Many
students are quite capable of demonstrating in action the learning and
understanding that they are far less able to articulate on paper. For
process work, you also need to make a formative assessment. You can do
this by keeping an assessment checklist, or record, for each student, where
you note observations of their learning and development in action,
according to the criteria you have set. This checklist should be an ongoing
document that covers the period of the whole course, and should record all
changes and developments from what you know of the student’s level of
capability, as you see them arising. Of course, one-off checklists for a
specific task and criterion can be valuable in tasks that give students the
opportunity to demonstrate their level of skill and understanding in that
criterion. A sample checklist, devised for slightly younger students but quite
appropriate to Dramawise Reimagined, can be freely accessed on the
website for the drama e-textbook Pretending to Learn: Teaching Drama in
the Primary and Middle Years, by John O’Toole and Julie Dunn, in the First
Fleet drama on the Exemplars menu.
Finally, we believe that it is valuable and essential for the students to be
kept informed about the assessment, and the exact criteria you are using to
assess them. Moreover, they should also play a role in the process through
self-assessment. You therefore need to develop specific checklists on which
they can record their own perceptions of their learning. The reflective
journal is also a valuable platform for setting questions regarding what
students have learned. Until they have thus turned it into explicit and
reflective knowledge, as Dorothy Heathcote observed in the BBC film,
Three Looms Waiting (1971), ‘they know it, but they don’t know they
know.’
chapter 1
the human context
All drama work involves imagining a make-believe world and stepping
into the shoes of its inhabitants. For this pretend world to be meaningful
and purposeful, it must have aspects of the real world in it that we can
recognise, relate to and identify with. In other words, a human context
consisting of a situation involving people and their roles and relationships.
Inventing an imagined world, and inviting others to step into it, is
incredibly easy—it’s one of those things we humans do naturally (and that,
so far as we know, no other creatures can do). Let’s see how easy.

ACTIVITY 1 OBJECT CIRCLE

In this game, you will be invited into an imaginary world, and the only rule
is that you must accept the invitation, then invent another imaginary
world to invite the next person into.
1. Everybody stands in a circle, with Student A holding an object (any
smallish object—a book, a keyring, a scarf).
2. Student A: you decide quickly what the object will be transformed
into— something similar in shape and size—and who might in real
life be giving it to somebody else.
 3. The invitation: make eye contact with somebody across the circle—
Student B— then go over and give your object to them, making the
dramatic context clear. For instance, if you have transformed the
object into a notebook, you might say, ‘Psst … here are the secret
plans for the nuclear reactor—don’t let anyone see you taking
them.’ The invitation should be made seriously, respectful of the
game.
4. Accepting the invitation: Student B must take the object and reply
appropriately according to that dramatic situation: e.g. ‘Thank god
you’re here, I thought you might have been arrested. I’ll make sure
they get to you-know-who.’
5. The exchange need not last any longer than that. Now Student B
must turn the object into something quite different, in a new
dramatic situation, and make an invitation from that situation to
Student C across the circle: e.g. ‘Professor, take a look at this
amazing specimen I just brought back from the Amazon jungle.’
6. Continue until everybody in the group has had a turn.
7. The game works very well if the imaginary objects and fictional
worlds are easily believable and recognisable, and the offers
accepted seriously and immediately. It works even better when the
invitations are imaginative.
Play the game again, each time with a more awkward object (e.g. a
chair), and think of more bizarre and challenging invitations—e.g. ‘Would
you look after my dog for a bit please?—he doesn’t bite often!’ By now
everybody will be accepting the fictional worlds, and trusting each other,
so laughter is fine and you can have a lot of fun as this game develops.

In that simple activity, you have sown the seeds of as many new dramas as
there are people in the group. In each exchange, the two participants
stepped into an imaginary human context. This is the first element of
drama. We will begin to explore this element by considering five key
questions. These are often referred to as the Five Ws:
What is happening?
 Where is it happening?
When is it happening?
Who is it happening to?
What’s at stake?
The first four are the subject of this chapter; the fifth is the subject of
Chapter 2.

The Dramatic Situation—What’s Happening,

Where and When
In understanding a drama, it is nearly always helpful to look at these
questions first, to find out what the dramatic situation is. And to show how
easy it is to develop a situation you have invented, let’s try another drama
game. This game is rather like the last, but will take us further into the
dramatic situation.

ACTIVITY 2 ROLE CIRCLE

1. Everybody stands in a circle, with the leader (the teacher or a
student) in the middle. Everybody else is going to take on the role of
the same person, and answer questions as that person.
2. The leader takes the role of a detective, and explains that this
investigation is into an incident that occurred some time last Friday.
3. The leader then asks someone at random their name. That person
must respond with a fictional name. Then the leader, starting each
query with that name, asks questions of other people, one at a time,
each question building on the previous answer.
4. The only rule is that when you answer you must accept everything
that has already been said, and neither contradict it nor block a
question with ‘I don’t know’ or an impossible or unrealistic response.
5. Make sure that a sensible story emerges. Until you are spoken to,
listen carefully and remember the answers given to the detective’s
questions. For example:
 Detective: What’s your name?
Student A: Mary.
Detective: (to another student) Mary who?
Student B: Mary Johnson.
Detective: (to a third student) How old are you, Mary?
Student C: Twenty.
Detective: (to a fourth student) Mary Johnson, where were you
at 7 pm on
Friday night?
Student D: In town with my friends.
Detective: (to a fifth student) Whereabouts in town?
Student E: In the shopping mall.
Detective: (to a sixth student) How many friends?
Student F: Two—my sister and her boyfriend.
Detective: (to a seventh student) Which of you first saw the
trouble start?
Student F: Her boyfriend.
Detective: What exactly did he see?
… and so on.
6. Run this investigation until everybody has had a turn, or until the
incident and the Three Ws have become clear.
What’s happening?
When is it happening?
Where is it happening?
7. Run this game a few times from different starting points, and
perhaps with the leader not as a detective, but another kind of
questioner, such as a suspicious parent, or a time traveller from
another age.

Role—Who it is Happening to
As the last two activities showed, you can’t portray a human situation
without people being the most important part of it. In theatre and drama
these fictional people are known as the characters, and in improvised and
process drama, which we use throughout this book to explore its elements,
we will be role-playing those characters.
Role-playing does not need elaborate acting skills; when you take on a
role you are simply representing a point of view. You can portray this
simply, honestly and as yourself—you don’t need to ‘act the part’ with
special voices, costumes or funny walks, and often not even props. What
you do need in improvisation is the ability to signal and negotiate your
role and relationships with the other players.

ACTIVITY 3 NEGOTIATING ROLE AND

RELATIONSHIPS
1. Form pairs and find a space apart from everyone else. Decide who is
A and who is B.
2. A then moves away from B, and takes a few seconds to think of a
situation (if it helps, choose one of the situations you came up with
in Activities 1 and 2). A’s task is to start a role-play with B. A must
immediately make clear:
the identities of both A and B
where they are
what they are there for.
3. A determines an appropriate way to start the conversation (the
opening line), then commences the exercise. B has to pick up the
cues and respond as quickly and naturally as possible. Stop the role-
play after one or two minutes (no longer) and discuss how effective
those first moments were. B: did you get clear signals from A about
who you were and what your relationship was with A?
4. Repeat the exercise with B offering a new situation. When
discussing, ask whether the signals and the relationship were more
clear this time.
5. Separate again. This time, B will adopt and hold a particular physical
 position (e.g. staring out of a window). Repeat the exercise, but now
A must take into account B’s position (e.g. ‘Julia, watch out for the
doctor—call me the moment he arrives.’). Cut and discuss your roles
and relationship, and how the drama might have developed.
6. Repeat with A taking up a new position and B offering the situation.

You can see from this activity that you have the opportunity to accept,
reject or modify each other’s attempts to shape your character, without
coming out-of-role. If, for example, it is said to you in-role: ‘Ah so you drive
that green Ford!’ you have a choice of a range of responses. You could
reply:
‘Yes, I’ve had it two years.’ (accepting the idea)
‘No, I haven’t even got a licence.’ (rejecting the idea)
‘Well, it’s actually my parents’ car.’ (modifying the idea)
This ongoing negotiation of the situation, roles and relationships is an
important foundational step in all improvised drama.

Developing a Role
Stepping into role is at once similar to and different from acting the part of
a character in a play or film. Actors generally need to build a complex
personality and background for their character—a process called
characterisation. In improvised drama, our needs are usually not so
detailed. We take on the role simply by identifying with the person in that
situation and adopting the appropriate attitudes.
There are three basic aspects of role to take into account when
improvising:
purpose
status
attitude.

The Purpose of the Role

As you develop your role, keep in mind the purpose this character has in
the drama, and the goal or aims they are pursuing. Their purpose may
change, sometimes quite quickly. For example, a character may start by
seeking help or information from a friend, but end up giving support to
that friend when something terrible happens to them in the course of the
drama.

ACTIVITY 4 PURPOSE BUILDING

PRELIMINARIES
Divide into pairs.
SITUATION
A is calling on B, to ask advice about a personal problem.
B is shaken after just hearing some bad news.
ROLES
A. a young person your own age.
B. a middle-aged friend of the family.
MANAGEMENT
A: decide what your problem is—e.g., money, a girl- or boy-friend, school-
work, etc.
B: decide what news you have just heard—perhaps a phone call or text
from your daughter, or some news on television.
Both should avoid being melodramatic or over-the-top. Your ideas need
to be both sensible and believable.
A: start the role-play by approaching B as if calling at their house.
CONSTRAINT
Remember that you both have a purpose, but that your purpose may
change. Remember also that you both like and respect each other.
OUTCOME
After three minutes, B, stop the role-play using the excuse that you need
to take a phone call.
REFLECTION
Briefly discuss with your partner whether you were able to achieve your
 purpose or had to modify it.

The Status of the Role

All relationships have an element of power in them. One person has some
edge over the other, perhaps a higher position or some special
knowledge, or greater age and experience. We call this status, and it
affects your manner and bearing towards the others in the drama. It may
depend on the situation: e.g. an elder brother or sister might be a junior
player in a team you are coaching. Status may also be shared and equal
in the situation: e.g. two parents with their child or some employees talking
to their boss. You have to consider your roles, in relation to each other, in
terms of status. Will your role be of higher, lower or equal status?
Higher status: a monarch, bank manager, computer expert, champion
sportsperson, a wise grandparent.
Lower status: being exiled by the monarch, needing a loan, needing a
computer fixed, dropped from the team, in trouble with your parents.
Equal status: exiles together, bank managers together, two people
swapping crashed computer stories, team members, two
grandparents, or two kids in trouble.

ACTIVITY 5 STATUS BUILDING

Scene 1: The amicable bank

PRELIMINARIES
Divide into threes. Give your group chairs and sufficient space to work
separately from the other groups.
SITUATION
A local office of the Amicable Bank. An interview between A and B in the
Branch Manager’s office. A wishes to borrow a large amount of money
from the bank, and the outcome depends on the interview.
ROLES
A. A seventeen year old in your first job.
B. Branch Manager of the Amicable Bank.
C. (out-of-role) watches the scene, and observes how the manager
maintains the higher status, and the youth the lower.
MANAGEMENT
A: decide why you want the money and how much you want. Where do
you work, how much are you earning (be realistic!), and what is the
weakness in your request that you might have to own up to or defend?
B: you are prepared to loan money to young people, but you must be
convinced that they are responsible citizens who have the ability to meet
the repayments.
Run the scene as realistically as you can.
OUTCOME
Eventually the manager will lend the money.
REFLECTION (IN-ROLE)
A: write a triumphant social media update announcing that you got the
loan, including how hard it was and how the manager used his or her
status over you.
B: write a brief report to attach to the customer’s file, explaining what
your doubts were about this young person and why you finally decided to
lend the money.
C: write an account of what you saw, picking out as accurately as you can
examples of high and low status behaviour.
Share these accounts with each other.

Scene 2: The not-so-amicable bank

SITUATION
Some months later in the District Manager’s office. The Branch Manager
is being reprimanded by the District Manager, because the seventeen
year old has proved to be a bad risk, and defaulted on the loan
repayments.
 ROLES
B. The Branch Manager.
C. The senior District Manager.
A (out-of-role) watches the scene to observe how B’s behaviour changes
when in the lower status position.
MANAGEMENT
The District Manager wants to know why the Branch Manager lent the
money to young A, and accuses B of being a bad judge of character, and
miscalculating the risk. The District Manager uses the report that B has
written as part of the evidence of that bad judgement.
OUTCOME
B is eventually let off the hook, but not before being quite humiliated—
and having no choice but to swallow it.
REFLECTION (OUT-OF-ROLE)
Briefly share what you noticed about the difference in behaviour
between the low and high status characters. Look especially at the
signals given out by B, who was still the same person in the same job, but
with the status reversed.

Reflecting On and Documenting Your Work

You will notice that this activity extended into more of a real drama than
our first three exercises, and we added two new components. The first is
asking you to reflect on what took place. At the end of any drama or play,
it is worthwhile, and sometimes essential, to think about and reflect on
what you have just done or seen, to get to understand it better. That may
be just through discussion reflection out-of-role, as we asked you to do at
the end of Scene 2. It may also happen within the drama reflection in-role,
as an extension of the drama itself, as at the end of Scene 1 where you
were still in-role.
The second new component, completing Scene 1, was expressing your
reflection in writing. Writing as a form of reflection, or the use of other
media like photographs or blogs, can sometimes bring you to greater
insights than discussion, and is more personal. Each of the three wrote on
something quite different, appropriate to their character and position, and
looking at the drama from their own point of view. A and B were both
writing from inside the drama, still in-role, while C was commenting on the
action from outside. This distinction is quite an important one, which we
will return to later.
We hope this written reflection helped to fix the significance of Scene 1
in your own minds. Some of the writing even became an essential part of
the drama itself, as B’s report was included in the evidence that C used
against B.
Writing can be longer-lasting than the drama itself, which by its nature
just exists in the moment. In the dramas which follow, you will be writing
and also designing, building, recording and devising artwork that will last
beyond the life of the drama itself, and become its documentation.

The Attitude of the Role

Every character in every drama has their own attitudes regarding the
situation and the other characters. POWs in a prison camp, for instance,
will all miss their freedom and long for home. But some will hate the camp
and the guards; some may feel content in the camp, safe from the dangers
of combat; some may sympathise with their captors. Your attitudes to the
other characters may be shared or held individually. You might all hate the
guards; however some of you may have a more sympathetic attitude
towards them, especially if you share a common background or a common
interest like sport.
It is important to have clear and good reasons why you like or dislike,
admire or disapprove of the other characters. It is also important to be
clear about how negotiable or fixed these attitudes are—in other words,
how much you might be prepared to change them during the action … or
not!

ACTIVITY 6 ATTITUDE BUILDING

SITUATION
A prison camp—you decide which war or country. The guards have been
ordered to organise all the prisoners into a concert party. The prisoners
have already heard rumours about this.
ROLES
Four or five prisoners and two guards.
Get into groups of six or seven and cast yourselves (that is, decide
who plays which role). Use furniture or rostra to define an appropriate
space to represent the prison hut and its doorway.
The prisoners have a range of attitudes towards the concert: e.g. one
may think it will relieve the boredom; another may see it as an attempt to
humiliate them; a third may see a potential chance to escape; a fourth
may just enjoy performing.
The guards have different attitudes too: one is friendly with many
prisoners, and favours the concert; the other hates the prisoners and
thinks the camp is not harsh enough.
Prisoners: each decide on the attitude you will take—it should be one
which you feel comfortable with and can believe in. Briefly share your
decision with your group, to ensure there is a wide range. Make sure that
everybody knows who is the friendly guard, who is the harsh one.
CONSTRAINT
Remember, the guards have all the power, so avoid melodramatic
conflicts and bravado.
MANAGEMENT
In the hut the prisoners have a meeting to discuss the concert party
plan. Outside, and out of earshot, the guards discuss it too.
The guards enter, to start organising the concert. According to your
character, you may or may not be persuaded to change or moderate your
attitude.
OUTCOME
Let this scene run until all the attitudes have become clear in the
characters’ behaviour, then close it with the guards leaving.
 REFLECTION (IN-ROLE)
One or both of these tasks can be done, for both prisoners and guards.
Public follow-up: if you are in favour of the concert, design a flyer or
poster outlining your ideas for the concert, and asking for volunteer
performers (or, to stretch probability, an e-poster—if it’s a
contemporary war and a very humane prison camp!). If you do not
support the concert, design a satirical poster or e-poster mocking it.
Private follow-up: prisoners write an entry in a secret diary; guards
write a letter home to your family. Each is written after the concert,
giving your opinion of it and picturing what might have happened.
Describe how the concert confirmed or reversed your opinions and
your attitude to it.

This is as far as we will go here, but you might notice that these scenes
could be extended into an exciting drama about the concert—a success or
a catastrophe; how it splits up relationships and forms new ones—and
could even involve an escape attempt. It is the beginning of a process
drama.

Documentation for Understanding

Again, there was a double documentation task in this drama. Its purpose
was to help you fix and express your final attitudes clearly. Expressing
them in writing, like the letter and diary, or other media, like the poster or
flyer above, is often the best way for this.
These tasks involve different kinds of documentation: one is design and
one is writing; one is public and the other private. Drama creates many
opportunities to write for both public and private audiences. As you will
recall from the banking scenes (Activity 5), we can also write from inside
the drama, still in the role, or from outside the dramatic action. In the
prisoner-of-war camp drama, both documentation tasks are from inside the
dramatic action.

Motivation
Purpose, status and attitude all form part of the character’s motivation.
Motivation refers to what the character hopes to achieve. Very often, in
order to create a strong drama, this goal is hidden from others in the
drama. As a result we may find characters saying and doing one thing,
while in fact they really believe and want something else. For example:

What seems to be going on What is really going on

The council official expresses The official—who designed the
sympathy for the young family who bypass—thinks it is in the interests of
are afraid that the new road will the whole community, and cares little
pass through their property. for the problems of that individual
family.
An older married couple are The couple are very unhappy in their
encouraging a young woman to marriage, and trying not to let it
make up her mind and marry her show.
boyfriend.

Subtext
As you can see from the examples above, all is not what it seems. We
refer to what is said as the text of the drama. The real intention, which lies
unspoken beneath the text, is called the subtext. These concepts of text
and subtext are very important in drama, and are nearly always involved
in the creation of rich dramatic action. As you work through the activities
and play extracts in the book, you will see how subtext adds interest and
another dimension to the drama. People’s actions and relationships are
very rarely simple, and there are often lots of attitudes, intentions and
feelings going on at the same time, some of which can be acknowledged,
some of which remain deeply hidden. This is true of both role-play and
plays for audiences. As a participant in process drama you need to keep
in mind how much of these attitudes and feelings you want to reveal to the
other characters. As a playwright, or actors in a play, you need to
consider how much of them you want to reveal to the audience.

AND IN PLAYS …
TWO WEEKS WITH THE QUEEN by Mary Morris
The first piece of text we use is appropriately the beginning of a play: Two
Weeks with the Queen. The odd title doesn’t really give us much of a clue
about the subject of the play, except that we might be expecting it to be set
in a palace. The opening is therefore our first surprise, when we discover
right away that it is set in a very ordinary Australian family home. The
opening stage directions (and this is what the audience sees first, too)
make the first three Ws absolutely clear: What’s happening, Where and
When—and that is important here. The first few lines of dialogue quickly
make the fourth W quite clear: Who it’s happening to—a very ordinary
elder and younger brother, and their dad and mum … at least apparently
so, anyway …

EXTRACT FROM ACT 1, SCENE 1

The music of God Save The Queen is heard followed by the plummy voice
of Her Majesty [Queen Elizabeth II] delivering her Christmas message.

At the Mudford place, MUM and DAD, barefoot and dressed in shorts,
singlets and paper hats, are fanning themselves with a bit torn off a beer
carton. They are watching the Queen’s Christmas Message on TV. COLIN,
also in shorts and very scuffed brown elastic-sided boots, sits some way
from them glaring at an open shoe box containing a pair of sensible black
school shoes. His kid brother LUKE runs in and out, strafing everybody and
everything with his new MiG fighter plane. COLIN picks up a shoe and
looks at it with distaste.

QUEEN: And a very Merry Christmas to you all.

COLIN: Merry faming Christmas.
LUKE strafes him.
Geoff!
LUKE: Wanna go?
LUKE does a circle of the room, shooting down the enemy and
swoops on COLIN again. COLIN throws a shoe at him.
LUKE: He hit me! Dad, he hit me!
DAD: Don’t hit your brother, Colin.
COLIN: I didn’t …
MUM: You heard your father.
COLIN: It was him, he started …
DAD: That’s enough! We’re trying to listen to the Queen here.
COLIN: Nobody ever listens to me.
LUKE: That’s ‘cos you’re not the Queen.
DAD: Just keep it down to a roar, eh?
DAD snuggles MUM closer to him and they settle back with the
Queen, who rabbits on about equality and justice for all.
COLIN: [quietly, in LUKE’s direction] Lucky for you I’m not the Queen. If I
was I’d have you locked in the Tower and torture you and put you on
the rack until your bones creak and then I’d have your fingernails
pulled out one by one and then I’d pour boiling oil on you and hang
you from the battlements and then I’d …
LUKE: Mum, I don’t feel well.
COLIN: Then I’d have you cut open right down the middle and your guts
would hang out and all the blowflies would come and the crows
would peck out your eyes …
LUKE: [louder] Mum, I feel sick.
MUM: Serves you right for having four serves of chrissie pud.
COLIN: Four? I only got three!
LUKE: I do, but.
He goes back to playing with his MiG.
COLIN: Prob’ly a strain of heat-resistant bacteria in the chrissie pud. If I’d
got a microscope for Christmas instead of a pair of school shoes, I
could have run some tests and spotted it. We’ll prob’ly all come down
with it now.
DAD: Colin, go and shut the back door, mate—keep some of the heat out.
COLIN: Why can’t he go?
DAD: ‘Cos I asked you to.
COLIN: Yeh, well he’d be quicker, he’s got turbo thrusters, I’ve only got
lace-ups.
MUM and DAD exchange a guilty glance.
As You Prepare to Perform
You will have noticed that in the extract above the dialogue is in plain font,
while what the stage looks like and what the playwright wants to happen
physically—called the stage directions—are in italics. This is how
playscript is most commonly formatted, to help actors and directors easily
distinguish what is said from what is happening.
You can’t just perform a scene like this off the cuff, obviously. First of all
you have to read and think about it very carefully—who are these people,
what is their relationship, status, attitude and motivation? There might also
be some subtext that you need to know about. This preliminary
investigation is one aspect of rehearsal, the work that goes into practising
the material before performance.
This scene can be rehearsed and performed in small groups so that
everybody has a chance to try it out. Or, if you prefer, you can select four
people to play Colin, Luke, Mum and Dad, with the rest of the class
helping them to set the scene and work out the characters, their
relationships, and so on, then observing as it is tried out, looking to find
ways to improve it, and make the attitudes and motivations clearer.

THINK ABOUT
Though for us this is the first time we meet the characters in their setting
(where the action is happening), they know each other backwards, so they
won’t actually be telling each other who they are. The playwright gives us
other clues so that we can work out what kind of people they are and their
relationships.

What’s happening, where and when?

1. How is the stage set up to make these three Ws quite clear even
before the characters speak?
2. How does the dialogue that follows reinforce the importance of
‘Where’ and especially ‘When’?

Who is it happening to?

RELATIONSHIPS
1. These are implied for us in the two characters’ names, MUM and
DAD. However, the audience will not know that, so how is it made
clear in the text?
2. What else can we deduce from the dialogue and stage directions
about the family—their ages, how much money they have, their social
class, for instance; their likes and dislikes?

STATUS
1. Can you work out who has higher, lower or equal status, and in what
ways?
2. How do they use and make their status clear to each other?

ATTITUDE
The text:
1. These characters all have very strongly expressed attitudes towards
each other. What are they?
The subtexts:
2. Do you think Mum and Dad are caring or uncaring?
3. What does Colin think of his and his brother’s Christmas presents?

And here are two further subtexts about Luke, and about Colin’s feeling
for his brother, which you need to know for the performance, but will
not get from this opening extract. At the end of the scene, Luke
collapses; it is the first sign of a deadly cancer. The rest of the play is
about Colin’s frantic, wild and often very funny efforts to get the Queen
to help Luke get cured. Knowing this:

4. How and where in your performance might you give the audience
a hint that Luke is not just ‘putting it on’ when he claims to be sick
after Colin’s efforts at winding him up?
7. How might you show physically the deeper care for each other that
these two quarrelsome brothers have, which they are certainly not
showing in the dialogue?

TRY OUT THE SCENE

Make and furnish with chairs or rostra a space to represent the Mudfords’
living room, and gather a minimum of simple props: the TV, the parents’
fan, the shoes and shoebox and Luke’s model plane. How can you
manage the Queen’s speech? If you are working in groups larger than
four, the others have an important role as directors, to help the actors get
the scene right and make it interesting for an audience.
Don’t try to learn the lines; just rehearse it with books in hand, and act it
out physically.

AND IN PLAYS ...

SNAGGED by Robert Kronk
Like the previous extract, this comes from the start of a play, but it is not so
naturalistic (like real life), and the audience is given far less information in
the opening stage directions about the setting and characters. There is no
information whatever for director and actors about the stage set; the only
important technical instructions at the beginning are the sound cues—the
instructions on what sound effects are required. The opening of the play is
a piece of weird solo movement by one actor, who follows it with a
monologue (a solo speech), from which the audience has to work out not
only who that character is, but what on earth the piece of movement they
have just seen was all about.

EXTRACT FROM SCENE 1

Silence. Music, a waltz, is dimly heard. Suddenly a blood-spattered
butcher dances across the stage with a bloodied pig’s carcass in a
macabre waltz. The music builds to a climax.

SAM: [screaming] Ahhh!

The BUTCHER flees as SAM enters; she has just woken up and is
struggling into her shoes.
I have this dream all the time, apparently when you dream your
teeth are falling out it means you’re stressed. I’m not sure what it
means when you dream about dancing butchers. It could be
worse. I used to have this dream my English teacher was naked
and she was rubbing things off the blackboard, and her bum
kept … [She shudders.] So all up this one’s not too bad.
 We’ve got three weeks till the end of school, which is pretty
scary, worse we’ve only got three months till the Debutante Ball.
The Deb is all anyone talks about: who you’re going with, what
you’re going to wear, did you hear Sandra’s going with Andrew
Barrett? The only other thing anyone talks about is what they’re
doing when they finish school.
I don’t want to talk about either. I hate dancing. I don’t have a
dress or a partner and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do
when I finish school. Well I do, well I don’t, you see I want to be
a vet but that means going to university, which means going to
Brisbane which I’m not sure I want to do, but it also means telling
my dad that I want to be a vet and move to Brisbane, which
means telling him that when I said I would stay and help run his
butcher shop I was lying. Which I wasn’t … then, but. And lying
to my father makes me nervous because I don’t like lying to my
dad but also ’cos it’s a bit scary lying to a man who could mince
you and sell you by Monday.
When I was a kid my Dad always measured my size in steaks.
I used to think it was funny but now … but today is Saturday,
which means no school and no talking about the bloody
Debutante Ball.

That’s the end of the scene.

As You Prepare to Perform

Get together in groups of three or four, and start by carefully reading the
piece. Try reading it aloud once you get the hang of it. Sam is not long
into the monologue before you can start piecing together who this
character is:
Sam is a name that can be male or female: which is this Sam? How
can you tell?
How old is Sam?
Who do you think Sam is talking to?
 What does the monologue tell us about Sam’s father and their
relationship?
There are clues to Sam’s mood, and also to how the speech should be
delivered, both in Sam’s use of grammar and how the playwright
punctuates the sentences. Discuss what you can work out about Sam’s
state of mind.
You might almost be able to work out what the cryptic title ‘Snagged’
means—which is a pun on two of the meanings of the word. (For new
English speakers, a snag is a slang word for a sausage.) What other
meaning does it have, that is already indicated in the text?
How might the weird movement sequence that introduced the scene
be relevant to the human context that Sam is describing?
This scene is mainly a lot of words, but the audience has eyes as well as
ears, and they want to see things happening. They need to see Sam’s state
of mind made visible in what she is doing.
When you have answered the questions above, choose one person to
act Sam, while the rest of the group co-directs to help the actor work out
Sam’s actions. All groups can be working simultaneously on this.
There is one helpful stage direction as Sam enters, which gives you a
hint on how to start, and if you are clever, you can use this to show the
audience Sam’s state of mind. Go through the text one paragraph at a
time—perhaps using different actors, who may draw attention to different
things in the text—and work out other things Sam would be likely to be
doing, which would give the audience a picture of her mood, and even a
visual image of what she is talking about.
The stage direction suggests that the scene is probably set in Sam’s
bedroom: how might this be indicated by set or action? (Be careful, the
next scene is set in a supermarket, so you can’t use elaborate furniture or
scenery).
There is one other consideration as you rehearse this (again, script in
hand—don’t try to learn the words unless you are actually going to
perform it). A very important aspect of drama is empathy. When we
empathise we are identifying with the characters—there is something we
recognise where we can say ‘that could be me’. Often this is just a feeling.
We often also feel sympathy for the character. Here, we are expected to
both empathise and sympathise with Sam, who is the central character in
the play. Discuss these questions in your groups, and work out how you
will convey your answers to the audience.
Do you empathise with Sam? If so, what in the text makes you do so?
Are you sympathetic to Sam, and if so, why?
How can you make the audience empathise and sympathise with
Sam?
chapter 2
dramatic tension
Like the rubber band that drives a simple model aeroplane, tension is the
force that drives our drama. In some ways it is the hardest element of
drama to grasp, because you cannot see it or touch it, you can only feel it;
yet no drama exists without it—it must be created, and it can certainly be
lost.
In getting to understand the human context, we dealt with four of the five
crucial Ws in any drama. This chapter is about the fifth: What’s at stake?
That is the question that underlies the dramatic tension. In fact it also
relates to the fourth W—the characters’ motivation—there must be
something at stake that drives and motivates them, and sustains the
participants’ or audience’s interest to find out whether they reach their
goal or lose their stake.
We are going to use games at the start of each of the practical activities
in this chapter, because games are akin to drama: tension is often what
makes games work best. Games and drama are always more enjoyable if
the central problem is not too quickly resolved … it’s no fun if it’s too easy,
because there’s no tension.

ACTIVITY 1 GOTCHA !
 The more tension there is, and the longer it can be sustained, the better
the drama. This can be easily demonstrated with a game.
1. Two volunteers, A and B, stand in the middle of the room, quite close
together. Everybody else stands round the perimeter of the room. A
starts to threaten B, miming some kind of weapon or implement
used as a weapon (try and make it clear what it is). B initially backs
away, but is caught and hit (in mime!) with the weapon. Try this as
quickly as you can. You may have found the exercise a bit exciting,
but not very tense.
2. The following is just a form of tiggy or tag. Divide the group into two
halves, A and B, with a volunteer from each group. The two
volunteers start at opposite ends of the room. Everybody else finds
a space in the room, and remains there throughout the game.
Volunteer A, your task is to stalk and try to touch B. Without moving
from their spots, everybody else tries to help the volunteer of their
group. This was probably more exciting, and with more tension,
especially the longer it went on.
3. Now choose another two volunteers, A and B, and two guards. With A
and everybody else at one end of the room, B is at the other end,
held by the two guards. This time A is moving very slowly and
silently, holding the weapon daintily but menacingly; on reaching B,
slowing even further, drawing out the moment before the violent hit.
This time, you will notice rather more tension, and the tension is in
the approach, not the act itself.
4. This time, everybody is grouped in a menacing horseshoe around B
as A moves slowly across the space to B, each maintaining eye
contact, with the only sound the ominous clicking of everyone’s
fingers in unison. More tension still?

Creating Tension
The scene you just created was violent, but dramatic tension need not have
anything to do with violence, or even conflict—although there often is
conflict in drama. It’s more helpful to think of the sources of tension as the
problems which the characters have to resolve. There are five major types
of dramatic tension.

Tension of the Task

Sometimes what the characters are doing to reach their goals provides
sufficient tension. All the characters are engaged in doing purposeful
things, tasks towards fulfilling their goals; sometimes together, sometimes
individually. That makes up the action of the drama. In plays and films, this
tension is usually seen in the form of suspense, where the audience
watches the characters struggling with the task in front of them, and
doesn’t know whether they will win or survive, or fail and perhaps die in
the attempt. In improvised process drama, which you will meet in the next
chapter, suspense is not so important, as collectively we have not yet made
up the ending and can therefore resolve it however we wish. We are those
characters ourselves, and so we have a stake in reaching their—our—
goals. To create tension and keep up the interest, these tasks need to be
difficult, important, and urgent.

Make the task hard

Just as a good game must be a challenge, if the task is not difficult the play
will be quickly over, and nobody will care about the outcome anyway, as
we have not worked for it.

ACTIVITY 2 LISTENING HARD

The game
1. Work in pairs, A and B, where A is looking at a common object or a
picture of it—a coffee cup, a ballpoint pen, for example—which B is
to sketch. B does not know what the object is. A gives instructions as
accurately as possible about how to draw the object, but must not
give any hint as to its identity. B, as you draw, can you guess what
the object is? Finally, compare what you have drawn with the
original. It should be fun.
2. Now swap tasks, and make the game harder by making the object
 more complex, like a horse, or Sydney Opera House.
From game to drama
SITUATION
A house has been broken into, but without forced entry; cupboards are
torn open and emptied and there are traces of blood. An anonymous
neighbour has raised the alarm, after hearing screams.
ROLES
Kel, a young person about your own age
One or two police officers
One or two children’s services social workers
In groups of four or five, a volunteer, A, plays Kel, the only person in the
house when the police arrive. Kel is cowering in a bedroom, badly
traumatised (shocked and silent). The rest of you divide into police
officers and social workers.
A, use your imagination to decide what actually happened that was so
terrifying. Whatever it was, whoever broke into the house saw Kel just as
they were going and said: ‘And you kid, you saw nothing. Remember?
Nothing. If you forget that, we’ll be back for you.’
MANAGEMENT
While A takes a few minutes to work out what had happened and what
they had seen, the police officers and social workers discuss how they
are going to interview this young witness in order to find the truth. Set
the scene up physically to represent an interview room, however you feel
most appropriate.
Now run the scene, where the officers try to get the facts, and Kel tries
to keep them hidden.
A (the actor, not the character Kel) should notice that in this
encounter you have all the power, so make the officers’ task really hard
—you can be tongue-tied, and quickly reduced to terrified silence, but
you can also feed them misleading information or evasions, as you
imagine Kel might. If you find they are working effectively, you can give
out snippets of half-uttered information.
Cut after five minutes, whatever the progress.
REFLECTION (out-of-role)
Straight away, discuss the scene for a minute or two. How much real
information did the officers get, and which strategies did they find most
convincing?
Now take another two minutes to discuss what kept the scene
interesting and exciting. The scene probably worked to the extent that
Kel made the officers’ task hard, almost too hard, but just possible, so
long as they got their approach and their questions right.
This source of tension is very common in many television dramas with
similar storylines, as you have no doubt seen.
Make the task important and urgent
Resolving the problem must matter to those in the drama. There must be
reasons why the task is important. For instance:
This is urgent because it’s the only way to …
We must be secret in case …
I have to do this otherwise we’ll never know …

ACTIVITY 3 FREEDOM BY TRICKERY

The game
1. One student is selected to stand in the middle of the space. This
person has great responsibility—you are the rescuer! A circle of
chairs is set down facing the rescuer, so that half the class can sit
down. These students are the prisoners. The other half, one standing
behind each chair, are their gaolers, who must prevent the prisoners
from escaping.
2. The rescuer must now attempt to save the prisoners by winking at
them. If you receive a wink, you must dive for the rescuer, out of
your gaoler’s reach. Your gaoler, without deserting their post, must
try to tag you as you make your move (just a touch, it does not need
a wrestle). If you are tagged by your gaoler you must sit back down.
Can the rescuer free all the prisoners? Try: it’s possible.
From game to drama
By naming the roles in this game as ‘rescuer’, ‘gaoler’, and ‘prisoner’, we
have already taken the first step towards giving the game a dramatic
context.
PRELIMINARIES
Make groups of four or five.
SITUATION
A room in a house where a nation’s popular leader, Kina, is being held
prisoner under house arrest by the government, but is allowed visitors
(like Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar and Nelson Mandela in South Africa
for a time).
On the surface this is a routine meeting to discuss normal party
business, with nothing controversial or likely to upset the government.
The real message, and subtext of the discussion, is that Kina’s party
have decided to organise a mass demonstration to protest Kina’s
continued detention, on National Day in three weeks’ time. They need
Kina’s approval.
Meanwhile, Kina has heard that the government is anticipating trouble
on that day, and is prepared to suppress any protests ruthlessly, no
matter how many lives it costs.
ROLES
Kina
Two or three party colleagues who are authorised visitors
A guard
CONSTRAINTS
The colleagues are free to talk or whisper among themselves, but the
guard sits beside Kina in order to be able to overhear every word.
Can the visitors find a way to convey their request to Kina without
risking arrest themselves, and if so, can Kina manage to warn them in
return? You may be able to deliver the messages without the guard
realising what the conversation is really about, or you may need to find
ways to divert or distract the guard (but note that violent bravado would
not be plausible).
MANAGEMENT
Set up the space to denote a closed room with one door, enough chairs
for all, and a table. The scene starts with the guard escorting the
colleagues into the room, then sitting down at the table with Kina.
Continue as long as the situation remains tense or until the messages
have been exchanged and the colleagues leave, then cut the drama.
 REFLECTION (OUT-OF-ROLE)
How did the tension in the game ‘Freedom by trickery’ connect with the
Kina drama? How did the simple tension in the game become the more
complex tension of the drama?

Tensions of Dilemma
The tensions of dilemma results from clashes within the situation itself,
where the character or characters in pursuing their goals have to select
between two or more conflicting courses of action, each of which has
advantages and drawbacks, and consequences according to the choice
that is made. This is one of the most common and powerful tensions in
drama:
first we see the character struggling to make a choice, anticipating the
consequences
then we follow what happens after the decision, keen to see whether
the consequences turn out as imagined.
Solving one dilemma may lead on to another, sometimes a bigger one.
The harder the decision, the greater the consequences, and the stronger
the dramatic tension.
Dilemmas may be:
Practical—for example, if the farming family moves to the city, what
will they have to give up, and what will they gain? (Scene A)
Personal—for example, a country student is torn between the offer of
a university nursing scholarship, or staying with her family-run
childcare centre. (Scene B)
Social—for example, different groups in a country town want a tourist
grant to be used for different improvements. (Scene C)
Moral—for example, neighbours are estranged over whether one of
them should grow genetically modified (GM) crops. (Scene D)

ACTIVITY 4 THIS WAY OR THAT WAY?

The game
 1. The class breaks into groups of three, and, within these groups,
decides who is A, B, and C. All As are to be blindfolded, at one end of
the space.
2. All Bs and Cs are to devise an obstacle course in the space using
chairs and rostra, leaving difficult, but still open, paths for the As to
follow.
3. All the Bs and Cs stand at the other end of the space from the As. You
must now call instructions to your own A. If you are B, you will help
your A to find a way through the obstacles by calling accurate
instructions. If you are a C, you will hinder by calling wrong
instructions. Each A must listen for the voice you can trust in order
to find your way through.
From game to drama
Before that game, we identified four types of dilemma. The examples we
used might all have shared the same first four Ws—of family issues
among contemporary country townsfolk—but the fifth W (What’s at
stake) was quite different. Try the following scenes, which illustrate
these different types of dilemma, and see how the tensions compare.
Scene A: Practical dilemma
PRELIMINARIES
Split into groups that are family sized—four to six people, no more, nor
less.
SITUATION
Dad comes home on Friday to announce that somebody has made a
good offer for the farm, and that he has been offered, but not yet
accepted, a manager’s job in the Landcare office in your capital city. This
would entail the whole family moving. The family agrees to think it over,
then discuss it over Sunday lunch.
ROLES
Dad, a farmer
Mum, who runs the town’s only childcare centre
Their child X (pick a name and gender), eighteen years old, recently left
school, who is working in Mum’s childcare centre, as well as helping Dad
run the farm
A respected grandparent
Possibly one or two other family members
CONSTRAINT
Keep the conversation respectful—this family likes each other, though
they may sometimes get under one another’s skin.
MANAGEMENT
Cast yourselves as this farming family that has always lived in this small
country town. Also decide on a role for any other members in your group
(nobody under eight or over eighty).
Agree on a few facts about yourselves and your ages and
relationships. Each participant can also add a piece of important
background information about your character that the other family
members would obviously know already.
Take a minute or so in silence to think yourself into the role, and
consider what would be the advantages and drawbacks for you of living
in the city.
Arrange the furniture to represent a family Sunday lunch. Start the
scene with Dad saying: ‘OK, do we all go or not? What do we think?’ Cut
when a decision is made, or there is an obvious stalemate.
Scene B: Personal dilemma
This scene, and the next two scenes, will involve the same initial four Ws:
a discussion about change, set at Sunday lunch-time, in a country town,
with the family you invented for Scene A.
SITUATION
X, the eighteen year old, has been offered a place in the city university to
study nursing. Dad sees X’s future remaining in the town; in the long
term, he wants X to take over the farm. At the moment, he admires how
much energy and fresh ideas X has brought to the childcare centre, so
that Mum is far less stressed. He is dead against X accepting the student
place. Mum is all for it.
MANAGEMENT
Start the scene with X saying: ‘OK, I’ve got to let the Uni know this week
whether I accept. What do we think?’ Cut when a decision is made, or
there is an obvious stalemate.
Scene C: Social dilemma
SITUATION
The grandparent is the Chair of the Shire Council, which has received a
Department of Tourism environmental improvement grant. A community
consultation has resulted in three hotly contested choices:
restoring a derelict heritage homestead
a major make-over of the neglected riverside to turn it into a
‘People’s Park’
a cyclo-cross track and spectators’ stands.
MANAGEMENT
Start the scene by the grandparent saying, ‘You know this grant we’ve
been offered to attract tourists—which proposal do you think will be best
for our town?’ Cut when a decision is made, or there is an obvious
stalemate.
Scene D: Moral dilemma
SITUATION
The farm is struggling with drought and poor prices. Dad, supported by
Grandparent, plans to introduce genetically modified (GM) crops, which
will probably save the farm.
Mum and X are dead against it, because the plan has already caused a
bitter dispute with their next-door neighbours and old friends who
oppose GM crops for environmental reasons and fear GM will ruin their
 own crops.
MANAGEMENT
In order to understand the moral implications in this dilemma, you will
need to bring background information to the scene (we call this
backgrounding). Give yourselves more to talk about by investigating GM
farming online and briefly finding out about the arguments for and
against, and the rights on both sides.
Start the scene with Mum saying, ‘I ran into Dave in the store
yesterday, and he cut me dead. This feud has got to stop.’ Cut when a
decision is made, or there is an obvious stalemate.

Tensions of Relationships
Conflict is the first thing many people think of when you talk about the
tensions of relationship. But there is also the tension inherent in
misunderstanding and, less obviously, in intimacy and ceremony.

Tension of conflict
Various kinds of conflict are central to most drama and plays, and conflict
is the easiest way of creating tension. Of all the types of tension, this is the
one we had most difficulty in classifying, because conflict can exist in the
context itself (What’s happening), among the characters (Who it’s
happening to) and is often the result of a dilemma—look back at the
dilemma scenes you have just tried out, and you will see that most of them
were bound to lead to conflict. However, because tension arising out of
conflict is so often shown in the relationships between characters, we have
placed it here.
The five major underlying causes of conflict are:
A clash of interests: the captain and vice-captain are vital to the
team’s Grand Final hopes, but have been invited to their best friend’s
wedding … which event should they attend?
A clash of rights: the battle continues between those who want the
Union Jack removed from Australia’s flag because they see it as the
symbol of a foreign power, and those who see it as part of Australia’s
heritage that soldiers have fought and died for.
 Clashes of power: bullying is primarily a conflict of this kind.
A clash of attitudes: in the clash of rights, above, the conflict can be
affected by one character being a veteran soldier, and the other a
recent Asian migrant.
Misunderstandings: these can cause or exacerbate conflicts, but are
not solely about conflict so we will classify them separately.

ACTIVITY 5 DID YOU SEE THE HEADLINE!

The game: knee boxing
Make pairs. Face one another, and with open hands attempt to slap the
knees of your opponent. Treat it as a contest—who will be the winner?
From game to drama
Many conflicts in drama are private, among individuals—like any of the
conflicts that might have arisen in your farming family as they faced
their dilemmas. However, public conflict is also often very dramatic, and
newsworthy—think of wars, and street demonstrations, as well as those
private quarrels that spill into public spaces, like neighbourhood disputes
and gang battles.
PRELIMINARIES
Divide the class into five groups, A, B, C, D and E.
Group A is dealing with a conflict of interest, Group B with a conflict of
rights, Group C with a conflict of power, group D with a conflict of
attitudes and group E with a conflict arising from misunderstanding.
SITUATION
Each group has to imagine a public incident, involving a very dramatic
moment of the kind of conflict they are dealing with. Imagine the
moment has been caught as a still photograph by a passer-by on their
mobile and has made the news or gone viral.
MANAGEMENT
STEP 1
One member of the group will be the narrator (storyteller). The rest,
arrange yourselves as a freeze frame of this dramatic moment. A freeze
frame, or tableau, is like a still photograph, but three-dimensional, using
your bodies to make the picture. The effect should be physically exciting,
but you must be able to hold it frozen for a couple of minutes.

STEP 2
Together, think of a headline or caption for the picture. Then, in no more
than two vivid sentences, explain the picture in a way that would
immediately tell a viewer something of all the Five Ws: What’s happening,
Where and When, Who’s involved and What’s at stake. This could form the
first two sentences of the news report that accompanies the photograph.
Part of the secret of good popular journalism is to get as much
information at the start of a story as possible.
Write your headline and sentences down.
Now, for each character in the photograph, decide exactly what that
person is thinking at this moment in the conflict. It should have
something to do with the clash of interest, rights, power, attitude or
misunderstanding the group is portraying. Express these thoughts in the
first person, as that character, ‘I think …’ (not ‘he would probably think
… ’)

STEP 3
In turns, stage your freeze frame as follows, while the other four groups
as audience observe carefully.
Narrator, count down: ‘Three, two, one … Freeze!’ Then, while the
group is frozen, speak or read as dramatically as possible your headline
and sentences. (This may need to be repeated for the audience.)
The audience discusses what they are seeing and how they are
interpreting the conflict they are looking at.
Finally, the narrator touches each character in turn on the shoulder,
and that character expresses, clearly, their first-person thought at this
 dramatic moment. This is called thought-tracking. The audience needs to
listen carefully and then discuss what they now know.
Now move on to stage the freeze frames from the other groups in just
the same way.
REFLECTION
When you have finished all five, you might like to compare them, firstly to
discuss how they demonstrated each kind of clash, and whether
elements of the other kinds of conflict were also involved. Then discuss
what made them dramatic, and whether (and possibly how) any of them
might have been even more clearly depicted.

Remember this activity, as this technique is a very good way of starting

play-building. We shall return to it in Chapter 13.

Tension of misunderstanding
Misunderstandings, and the consequences which flow from them, provide
the source of much dramatic tension that doesn’t always arise out of, or
even cause conflict. Misunderstandings can be accidental, where
characters genuinely don’t understand each other, or deliberate, where
one character hides something from another. Trying to resolve the
misunderstanding, and the resulting confusion, can work in two ways. In
comedy the misunderstanding and its consequences are inevitably funny;
in tragedy they are disastrous.

ACTIVITY 6 WHO IS IT?

The game: Who am I?
One student, A, is selected to leave the room. While out of earshot, the
rest of the group decide upon a famous character for A—a film star, say,
or the President of China. A, when you return, you must ask questions of
each member of the group in an effort to discover the identity you have
been allotted. Members of the group can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to these
questions. They must also treat you as if you really are that character.
The misunderstandings, until A guesses correctly, are usually very
funny.
From game to drama
Instead of another improvisation, try this famous piece of scripted satire
(drama that makes fun of serious things), written by the American
playwright James Sherman, Hu's On First. It maintains tension and
humour entirely through simple misunderstandings.
SITUATION
George W Bush was a President of the United States who got a reputation
for mixing up names, especially foreign ones (he once called Australia
‘Austria’). In 2006, the time of this fictional conversation with his
Secretary of State Condoleezza (‘Condi’) Rice, China had just appointed a
new President: Hu Jin Tao. The Secretary General of the United Nations
(UN) at the time was Kofi Annan, and the Palestinian leader was Yasser
Arafat (whose name is here spelt Yassir for the comic effect you will see
when reading it).

We take you now to the oval office.

GEORGE: Condi! Nice to see you. What’s happening?
CONDI: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.
GEORGE: Great. Lay it on me.
CONDI: Hu is the new leader of China.
GEORGE: That’s what I want to know.
CONDI: That’s what I’m telling you.
GEORGE: That’s what I’m asking you. Who is the new leader of China?
CONDI: Yes.
GEORGE: I mean the fellow’s name.
CONDI: Hu.
GEORGE: The guy in China.
CONDI: Hu.
GEORGE: The new leader of China.
CONDI: Hu.
GEORGE: The Chinaman!
CONDI: Hu is leading China.
GEORGE: Now whaddya asking me for?
CONDI: I’m telling you Hu is leading China.
GEORGE: Well, I’m asking you. Who is leading China?
CONDI: That’s the man’s name.
GEORGE: That’s whose name?
CONDI: Yes.
GEORGE: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of
China?
CONDI: Yes, sir.
GEORGE: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the
Middle East.
CONDI: That’s correct.
GEORGE: Then who is in China?
CONDI: Yes, sir.
GEORGE: Yassir is in China?
CONDI: No, sir.
GEORGE: Then who is?
CONDI: Yes, sir.
GEORGE: Yassir?
CONDI: No, sir.
GEORGE: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of
China. Get me the Secretary General of the UN on the phone.
CONDI: Kofi?
GEORGE: No, thanks.
CONDI: You want Kofi?
GEORGE: No.
CONDI: You don’t want Kofi.
GEORGE: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk.
And then get me the UN.
CONDI: Yes, sir.
GEORGE: Not Yassir! The guy at the UN.
 CONDI: Kofi?
GEORGE: Milk! Will you please make the call?
CONDI: And call who?
GEORGE: Who is the guy at the UN?
CONDI: Hu is the guy in China.
GEORGE: Will you stay out of China?!
CONDI: Yes, sir.
GEORGE: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the
UN.
CONDI: Kofi.
GEORGE: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone.
CONDI picks up the phone.
CONDI: Rice, here.
GEORGE: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we
should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you
get Chinese food in the Middle East?
MANAGEMENT
Try reading it out in pairs, simultaneously. (Watch your volume level as
the characters’ level of frustration rises!) You may like to watch the
scene on YouTube, but you will enjoy it more if you try it out first. The
YouTube clip plays the soundtrack over still photos of the President and
the Secretary of State, but you could also have a lot of fun bringing it to
life in the President’s office.

Tension of intimacy
Almost the opposite of conflict, intimacy—the close sharing of something
private and personal—can be a source of powerful dramatic tension.
When someone confides in you, you may feel a degree of tension when
you hear their secret. This is because a secret bonds people together—it is
an act of trust. The greater the secret, the greater the bond—and the more
there is to lose if the bond is broken.
 ACTIVITY 7 FINDING THE HANDS
The game
1. Form pairs of A and B. Sitting opposite each other, A is to take B’s
hands and, with eyes shut, explore them through touch, to get to
know them by the way they feel. Next, B takes A’s hands and
explores them in the same way.
2. When A and B know their partners’ hands well, join two other pairs to
form groups of six. With all six blindfolded, explore all of the hands to
find your partner. Be absolutely silent during this time. When you
are sure you have your partner, take your blindfolds off.
Don’t be surprised if you feel a strong urge to laugh during this exercise.
This is quite normal—exploring someone else’s hands in such a way is an
intimacy not normally shared by people. In fact, the laughter is your
discomfort trying to relieve the tension. It is essential that you don’t
laugh, however, or the tension will be lost.
From game to drama
A variation of this game forms the beginning of one of the most famous
love scenes ever written, certainly the most famous love-at-first-sight
scene. We have included it in the ‘And in Plays’ section at the end of this
chapter, to illustrate how a great playwright uses this tension. You may
wish to try it out now instead, which would be a very good idea if it fits
your timetable.

Tension of ceremony
A ceremony, or a ritual, carries its own tension, to do with:
Affirming that the task or the moment is a shared one
Confirming the importance of the task or the moment
Sharing the rightness and rhythms of doing the task with care.
This tension is very close to the tension of intimacy, and you will see that
the Romeo and Juliet scene in this chapter contains both tensions of
intimacy and ceremony.
 Many dramatic actions have something of ceremony and ritual in them:
you may remember how the very first activity in Chapter 1—the object
circle—became a kind of ceremony as members respectfully shared their
object with their partner. In the first activity in this chapter on tension, the
attack became a ritual when the group gathered in a circle, clicking
fingers rhythmically. You might notice that in both these activities, a circle
was important: in ceremonies formal shapes of movement and gesture are
always crucial. Ceremonies do not have to be grand. Many everyday
actions have a ceremonial element—eating together, meeting people,
going through Customs, bidding at an auction.

ACTIVITY 8 RITUAL CIRCLES

The game: The Court of the Holy Dido
1. One student is appointed the President of the Court of the Holy Dido.
The President holds the Holy Dido (this can be represented by a
rolled-up newspaper), and everyone stands in a circle, facing
inwards.
2. The President steps inside the circle and calls the others to order by
announcing, ‘Knights of the Court of the Holy Dido, this Court is now
in session. Bow as the Holy Dido passes.’ Solemnly, the President
parades the Holy Dido around the inside of the circle, the knights
each bowing in turn as it passes, then places the Holy Dido in the
centre of the circle, and returns to their place.
3. All sit on the floor, with arms and legs crossed, and from now on no-
one must make a sound. You cannot do anything—smile, scratch,
cough—without the consent of the President, for which you must
raise your right hand and request permission. The President can
choose to grant your request, or not. All the knights watch to see if
anyone is breaking the rules.
4. As soon as any knight breaks a rule then punishment is dealt out by
the President. The procedure for this is as follows.
A knight asks the President for permission to speak. If granted,
 that knight lodges the complaint about the rule-breaker’s
behaviour by saying: ‘President of the Court, may I take the Holy
Dido and punish knight [Julie] for [giggling/coughing/licking
her lips etc] without the permission of this Court?’
The President makes a ruling on this request, and gives
sentence by saying: ‘Honourable knight, I saw the unworthy
knight Julie [giggle/cough/lick her lips] and I decree that she
shall be struck one blow on each hand [or something similar].
Take up the Holy Dido.’
The challenger rises, takes the Holy Dido, administers the
punishment, then asks permission to return the Holy Dido to its
place (or risk punishment in turn). All this must be done with
the greatest care and respect.
5. The game continues in this way. The President can also direct one
knight to punish another if the knights are slow to see a fault and
demand punishment. The game concludes when the President
declares: ‘This session of the Court of the Holy Dido is now closed.’
From game to drama
This quite complex game is already more than halfway to being a drama
—there is the beginning of an answer to the first W (What is happening),
and the fourth (Who), and certainly a fifth (at stake is a humiliating
punishment). All it lacks is a Where and When to flesh out the human
context and turn it from a nonsense game into a serious and tense ritual
meeting. You might like to do that fleshing out.
What group of people might meet so seriously, in fear, and under an
absolute authority with the power to inflict immediate punishment? This
could be at a very high or very low social level: a political meeting in a
dictatorship, or a certain kind of traditional schoolroom. Try one of those,
or perhaps you can find your own, then work out the motivations and
attitudes of the participants. Why are they so in fear of punishment?
What kind of power does the leader hold?
Tensions of Surprise
A common way of injecting dramatic tension into action is to suddenly
introduce a shock or surprise. This shock releases energy and excitement
and the action quickly becomes richer. Surprise is often the result of
something quite unexpected happening suddenly. But it can also arise
when something that has been expected all along finally does come about.

Shock of the expected

You all anticipate that the inevitable will happen, but when? You may
desperately try to prevent it, work hard and hatch plans, but just when
things look like they’ll be okay after all—the expected happens. When the
eviction letter arrives or the death warrant is signed you are confronted
with what it means to you right now. Immediately you are affected by it,
and react freshly to it.
Another aspect of this tension is that it builds while we wait. Waiting
generally adds to the tension, as we anticipate it.

ACTIVITY 9 SURPRISE!
The game: Grandmother’s footsteps
This game requires a fairly large space. One student, A, is selected to
stand facing the wall at the far end of the room. Starting from the other
end, the other students are to advance, their task being to close in and
touch A on the shoulder, without being seen in motion. The group must
advance cautiously, taking small steps only, as A can turn round at any
time to spot people in motion. Anyone so caught must return to the
starting point.
From game to drama
You are now so well practised in moving from game to drama that you
should be able to set up your own dramas. Begin with a simple scene.
Take one of the two pre-texts we suggested above—the eviction letter or
the death warrant—and build a scene based on waiting and arrival. You
will probably need to do a little backgrounding of your own first. What has
 happened to lead to this? Who are these people? When and Where is it
set? It’s obvious What’s at stake, but Why?

Shock of the unexpected

The action in a drama unfolds and the characters pursue their tasks, then
something quite unpredictable happens, creating tension. The most
dramatic shock comes when your expectations are reversed, when you are
betrayed in some way or another. Suddenly you find:
your escape plans blow up in your face as the tunnel leads … to the
Asylum Wing
the poor refugee you have sheltered turns out to be … a war criminal
the wasteland you have reclaimed for the community … is now going
to be sold to high-rise developers.
This kind of reversal can only be used late in the drama, after strong
expectations have been established. Note too that there is a limit to our
capacity to be surprised, and that without the support of a good reason, a
surprise may turn out to be a dud, an anti-climax. So use it sparingly and
make it believable. In most dramas, tension is best generated by slowing
down the action, making the characters’ tasks and goals harder to
achieve, rather than by the sudden energy burst of a shock.

ACTIVITY 10 OVER TO YOU … SURPRISE!

The game
As with drama, you are now practised with almost-dramatic games. Can
you think of one of your own, perhaps from parties (children’s or
otherwise), that depends on the shock of the unexpected?
From game to drama
The three scenarios dot-pointed in the introduction above should trigger
ideas for tense drama scenes of your own. Again, background them first.
They all have the potential to be fleshed out into a substantial drama.
Tensions of Mystery
Dramatic tension can be heightened by mystery: there is something we
must discover (What does this mean? Where will it take us?), and possibly
secrecy (What are they hiding from us? Is this the whole story?).
For the audience watching a play, suspense is a tension of mystery, as
well as a tension of the task, when we do not know how it will all end. Of
course, we can still experience strong dramatic tension even if we do
know the outcome of the drama. After all, most people who watch Hamlet
or Star Wars have seen them before and know how they end (one hero
dies, the other doesn’t). However, it can be useful to build tension around
those things that are left unknown, or are unknown to us now.

ACTIVITY 11 SHHHH!
The game: wink murder
1. One student A, is selected to play the detective and leaves the room.
All other students sit in a circle and close their eyes. The teacher
walks behind the circle and silently taps one student on the
shoulder. This student will be the murderer.
2. A comes back and stands in the centre of the circle and the game
begins. The murderer first selects a victim by making eye contact
and then winks at them. If you are winked at, you’re dead, and you
must die by falling to the floor.
3. A’s aim is to identify the murderer before too many bodies pile up.
The murderer’s task is to kill as many people as possible. The victims
can try to spot the murderer, and so avoid being killed, but if their
number comes up they should enjoy dying theatrically.
4. As variants: if A is particularly sharp-eyed, try it with the victims
having to count silently to ten after the wink before they keel over;
or try it with more than one murderer (if one murderer winks at
another, they do not die). If the murderer is particularly good, try
appointing more than one detective.
 FROM GAME TO DRAMA
Once again, this game is already well on the way to becoming a drama.
Think of a way to use mystery and secrecy in a dramatic situation,
perhaps with investigators like journalists interrogating celebrities. Think
of the context: What’s happening, Where, When and with Whom? Who
knows something that others don’t and must not find out? What is at
stake for the investigators, and for those being investigated?

AND IN PLAYS …
THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE by Paul Thompson
TENSIONS OF DILEMMA AND CONFLICT
The Children’s Crusade tells of the attempted expedition to Constantinople
made by thousands of children in the Middle Ages. In 1212 the child
crusaders left Europe for the Holy Land, with the dream of freeing it from
Muslim control. The crusade resulted in the death of many children along
the way. The survivors suffered great hardship and were forced to buy
food and warm clothes from farmers they met in their travels.
In this extract, Simon (one of the crusaders) asks a farmer for food and
water. Suddenly David, the farmer’s son, says he wants to join Simon and
the other children on their crusade. We begin with his father’s response.

EXTRACT FROM ACT 1, SCENE 3

The FARMER collects the water and bag of food, and lays them at SIMON’s
feet.

Take these. Now you can have all that and what’s in my barn. Take
FARMER:
my jacket, you must be cold in the mountains.
He takes it off.
You can have all of these. But leave me my son.
SIMON: Is that everything you have?

FARMER: That’s everything I have.

SIMON: I respect your sacrifice. It speaks well of the love you have for your
 son …
FARMER: You say you are hungry … there’s meat in there. A sack of grain. If
you take him you will get nothing. Understand? No food. Nothing.
Less than nothing—you take on another mouth to feed. [Pause.] Now
choose. My son or my goods.
SIMON: You have little understanding of our cause. First of all we are not
going off to war, we go in peace to put an end to war. Secondly, we
intend to make no compromises. We shall not repeat the mistakes our
fathers made.
FARMER: Choose.
SIMON: The choice is very easy. Your son.

And this should be a difficult choice for SIMON.

FARMER: Take him.
DAVID: I’m sorry, Father.

FARMER: Go!

As You Prepare to Perform

This extract creates strong tension in a very short time. As you prepare the
scene, consider the following questions—they will help you flesh out the
subtext.
1. What relationship exists between the farmer and his son? Make a list
of reasons why the farmer would not want David to go on the
crusade. Ask yourself why David wants to leave with Simon.
2. What tensions are operating on each of the three characters?
3. When does the moment of greatest tension occur in the extract?
4. How might you use movement and space between the characters to
add to the tension?
5. How does David react to his father’s final ‘Go!’, and how do the
children leave the acting space?

TRY OUT THE SCENE

 1. In groups of three, taking the roles of the farmer, Simon and David,
read the extract two or three times. Discuss the source of the dramatic
tension in the scene, and the tensions affecting each character.
2. Set up your acting area and gather the props you need.
3. Try it out on your feet, still book-in-hand, varying the positioning and
the timing and even different possible tensions according to how you
think the characters are feeling.
4. Share a few of the performances and discuss the different
interpretations.

AND IN PLAYS …
ROMEO AND JULIET by William Shakespeare
TENSIONS OF INTIMACY AND CEREMONY
For this extract, it is helpful to have a set of neutral masks for all students.
These are face masks, typically white, with blank expressions, designed
not to show any emotion at all. Also if possible, have the script clearly
visible on a whiteboard, or project it, so that all the students can see it
wherever they are.
In Shakespeare’s most popular play, Romeo first meets Juliet at a party
where they are masked and thus unable to see each other’s face. In a very
short time, just by exploring hands—and with the most beautiful little
ceremonial conversation—they move from being total strangers to their first
kiss (though this extract doesn’t get that far). You may find the poetic
expression and unfamiliar word use of Elizabethan English a little tricky the
first time round, so it’s helpful to know that basically, Romeo wants to kiss
Juliet and she’s flirting with him. To begin with, just think of the hands,
think of the dialogue as a kind of ritual, and listen to the music of the
words.
Divide the class into two equal groups, and read the passage in chorus,
with one group reading Romeo, the other reading Juliet and the teacher
reading both. That will help you to get the basic drift of the to-and-fro of
this delicate and intimate negotiation.

EXTRACT FROM ACT 1, SCENE 4

ROMEO: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth the rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much—
Which mannerly devotion shows in this:
For saints have hands which pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO: Oh then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:

They pray. Grant thou, lest faith turn to despair!

… and within three more lines, Romeo gets his wish and kisses Juliet!

This is a serious acting challenge, because the real person (you in a

classroom) and the fictional characters (Romeo and Juliet at their party) will
be feeling very different in a great many ways. However, all it demands to
make the tension of intimacy really work is that the actors remain as
serious as the characters. As we observed in Activity 7, this scene is the
most famous, the most widely performed and viewed love-at-first-sight
scene in the world. There are many celebrated film versions you might like
to watch.
Now form pairs, a Romeo with a Juliet. We suggest you return to the
pairs you formed for the hand game in Activity 7. You may well find that
you have to take a role different from your own gender—if you are in a
boys’ or girls’ school you certainly will. You will probably be quite used to
‘swapping’ gender roles. If not, take this excellent opportunity to get used
to playing ‘against’ your gender. You will often see professional actors
doing this, and in fact, in the time of Shakespeare’s early plays like Romeo
and Juliet women were not allowed to act on stage, so Juliet was played
by a boy from the very beginning.
This time, instead of using closed eyes and blindfolds, put on the masks,
which will make it much easier not to be tempted to laugh when you touch
your partner’s hands and look into their eyes. Stand or sit where you can
see the words on the whiteboard. This is what they are talking about:
 You can probably work out that Romeo is working very hard to flatter
Juliet by calling on religion—‘holy’, ‘pilgrims’, ‘saints’, ‘shrine’—to
imply that Juliet is a goddess or saint. Pilgrims visit the shrines of saints
in order to kiss the statue, hoping the saint will grant their prayer.
That’s Romeo’s plan, too!
Juliet counters by saying that it’s better manners just to touch the
statue’s palm (her hand) with his, i.e. that joining palms can be sexy
enough! This gives her the chance of a neat pun, since ‘palmer’—
based on the idea of touching a saint’s hand—is another name for
pilgrim.
Romeo starts by pretending to feel unworthy (to ‘profane’ means to
show religious disrespect).
You can probably deduce the rest if you can work out exactly what they
are doing with their hands as they say each line. Hands, fingers and
palms can be very eloquent!
As you get the hang of the words and gestures, build that tension of
intimacy till there is an electric charge between you. Remember, the would-
be lovers are thrilled to be in each other’s company, and it’s all new to
both of them. The slower you take it, the better—the more tension of
intimacy there will be.
Next, work out how a seated audience would best be able to see what’s
going on well enough to clearly interpret it. When you have worked it all
out, you will no longer have difficulty in keeping a straight face.
Try comparing your interpretations with the rest of the class. They know
you (as classmates), but they have been doing this exercise with these
classic characters too, so you should all have got over any tendency to
relieve the tension (and spoil the play) by giggling.
chapter 3
focus
In any dramatic situation, where people and ideas meet, dozens of
dramas are waiting to happen. They can’t all happen at once or they
would muddle each other up, so we must decide to explore just one aspect
of the situation. The element of drama that does this is called focus, and in
this chapter we look first at how the drama group and then the playwright
focuses the action to make it dramatic. In improvisation and process
drama the whole group serves as the playwright. This chapter introduces
our first process drama.
A process drama about drugs in sport, for instance, could focus on:
Betrayal—What happens when millions of fans learn their sporting
hero is living a lie?
Justification—Why shouldn’t I take drugs, all successful athletes take
them?
Deception—What does it take to hide drugs from anti-doping
regulators?
Honesty—How can a drug cheat accept being a role model, while
knowing everything about them is untrue?
You will notice that the points of focus above have been posed as
questions. You may be curious about some aspect of drug taking in sport
and so have questions yourself you would want the process drama to
address.
 Be careful with your questions: you may have strong opinions about
drugs in sport and the way anti-doping bodies behave. Fine, go with them
—but you shouldn’t have all the answers already. If you set out to create a
drama about wicked drug cheats bringing their sport into disrepute you
will probably end up with predicable situations and characters, and the
drama will not be fresh and exciting. In the end it will be unconvincing
and ineffectual, because it tells you nothing you didn’t already know and
raises no new questions for you.
So, as you engage in the theme and content of your drama, note that
different focusing questions will lead to different stories, characters and
goals. For example, what different dramas might emerge if we ask
ourselves:

What would happen if …?

Why did … happen?

How could …?

What is the most important …?

Did the anti-doping regulators …?

Framing the Action

Deciding on your central question will limit which aspect of the subject,
which bit of action, you will explore. The next issue is how best to explore
it. The most obvious way is to get in and act it out, but there are other
ways of starting too—like exploring some of the attitudes which could
make cheating seem ‘normal’.

ACTIVITY 1 WINNING AT ALL COSTS

The following statements reflect quite different reasons for playing sport:
Athlete 1: ‘I like to run, faster and faster.’
Athlete 2: ‘I like to beat people.’
In groups of two or three discuss what these differences are. Is one
 statement more extreme than the other? Does anyone find either of
these statements troubling? How different are these statements from
others like, ‘No-one remembers who comes second,’ or ‘I like being part of
a winning team’.

One infamous elite athlete who secretly took banned drugs for over a
decade to improve his performance is the cyclist Lance Armstrong, once
an American hero and friend of the rich, famous and powerful, including
US presidents. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s Armstrong was the
number-one-ranked cyclist in the world, winning the Tour de France,
arguably the most gruelling bike race in the world, a record seven times.
He was recognised as a global cycling icon. In 2001 one opponent said,
‘I don’t know who can beat him or how we could do it. We’ve tried
everything. If you know the answer, please tell me.’ Armstrong retired after
his last Tour de France victory in 2005, although he made a comeback to
professional cycling in 2010. He retired for good in 2011 aged thirty-
nine.
Like many other top cyclists of his era Armstrong was frequently accused
of taking performance-enhancing drugs, accusations he aggressively
denied. However the evidence against him mounted and in 2013 he
finally made a stunning confession on national television, admitting to
doping for over a decade. He was subsequently stripped of his seven Tour
de France titles, banned from cycling for life and forced to repay millions
of dollars in prize money and sponsorship endorsements.
Let us start our process drama by considering the Armstrong story, to
learn how and why such a deception could happen and what it might
mean to live a lie for so long. Of course, our drama is fiction: we will not
necessarily find out what drove Armstrong or what he is really like,
although you can find out plenty about him through a simple browser or
YouTube search. But we will create and find out about characters who are
like him, fictional people in a similar situation.

The Drugs in Sport Drama

Scene 1: Colour and movement (for the brave or foolish!)

On 24 July 2005 Lance Armstrong won his seventh Tour de France title.
Obviously this was an extraordinary moment in the history of cycling.
Imagine the scene as Armstrong crossed the finishing line first—for the
seventh time! We could try to recreate the drama of this event, but that
would be a tall order—how could your drama group create the effect of
almost half a million cheering fans lining the two-kilometre long Champs-
Élysées, the most famous boulevard in Paris? In fact, it isn’t really
feasible to try to create the colour, noise, and scale of the event and the
enormous crowd. Instead, you can try to scale down such a sprawling
setting by focusing on a frozen image, or freeze frame, using the whole
class, of one moment along the Champs-Élysées.
This freeze frame does not actually tell us anything about the use of
illicit drugs in sport, but it provides a springboard for the question: Here’s
what everyone knows, but what was hidden from this moment?
To begin to understand more about the central questions of this drama we
must focus it differently, away from the impossible challenge of staging that
winning line spectacle, towards more sharply defined events which take us
into the tensions of doping in sport.

Scene 2: Post-victory celebrations, 25 July 2005

In small groups, try one or more of the following scenes to develop your
drama.
Armstrong celebrating in his hotel room after the victory ceremony
with three insiders who assisted him with his doping regime of
injections and blood transfusions.
At a post-victory celebration, Armstrong is challenged by a ‘clean’
American Tour de France rider, who questions Armstrong’s win, his
seven titles, and calls him a disgrace to American sport.
In a post-victory phone call, one of Armstrong’s female insiders talks
with her boyfriend about how Armstrong is ‘the greatest athlete who
ever lived’ and reassures him that Armstrong ‘only does what all the
other riders are doing anyway’.
You can research more information about these moments, to find out the
kind of people these athletes are. Or you may prefer to decide these
details yourselves, as our drama is a fiction based on this situation.

After the 2005 victory, evidence was slowly gathered which proved
Armstrong was doping on a massive scale. In October 2012 the US Anti-
Doping Agency released more than a thousand pages of testimony against
him, which included sworn statements from fifteen cyclists who had
witnessed his activities. Armstrong furiously denied this until January 2013
when, in a bombshell television interview with Oprah Winfrey, he
publically confessed.
When Oprah asked if he used drugs to win all seven of his Tour de
France titles he replied: ‘Yes.’ When she asked if they included steroids,
EPO and PED, he said: ‘Yes.’ When she asked if it was humanly possible
to win seven consecutive Tours, he said: ‘It was not. I view this situation as
one big lie that I repeated a lot of times.’
Before moving on to the next scene of our drama, watch the Oprah
interview, which is easily available on the Internet.

Scene 3: World opinion

How did the world react to Armstrong’s revelations?
In threes, take on the roles of one of the following groups of people. In
your threesome decide on your characters and agree together on a
shared attitude you hold about this revelation of Armstrong’s cheating.
You could choose to be:
Passionate Armstrong fans who are forgiving of him and remain
convinced of his cycling greatness.
Fellow cyclists who have remained ‘clean’, never taken drugs, but
persevered in the sport without achieving major international
success.
Sponsors, who in 2005 paid $23 million in sponsorship of
Armstrong’s cycling team.
Armstrong’s cycling teammates who testified against him in 2012.
All of them were active riders, who were given six-month
suspensions for their own participation in doping.
Sports psychologists commenting on what motivates athletes to
cheat. They might make reference to the comment made by
Armstrong when he was sixteen years old (we used this line in
Activity 1): ‘I like to beat people.’
Once you have done this, discuss in-role what public statement you will
make. Use a phone or video camera to record these statements and the
emotions this confession has stirred. Prepare your filmed statements for
a blog or discussion forum called ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ Concentrate on
conveying your attitude to this event that has shaken the cycling world.
When all statements have been rehearsed and finally recorded, play
them back for the whole group, one after the other. Note the different
attitudes of each group … and the effect this has on the ‘truth’.
Choosing the Dramatic Frame
The frame is when and where we decide to set our dramatic action.
These scenes allow us to see ‘framing’ in action.
In Scene 1 we took one actual event, which lay at the heart of this
drama, namely Armstrong crossing the winning line in 2005 and clinching
his seventh Tour de France title. As we saw, this is extremely difficult
(almost impossible) to recreate, although the event itself is central to the
story and a trigger for subsequent dramatic events. When we perform this
moment, the actual moment of victory, we frame it ‘inside the event’, for all
players are captured in the excitement and significance of things as they
happen right now.
Scene 2 focused on some of the main characters involved in Armstrong’s
victory. These moments all happened at the post-victory celebrations, close
in time to the event of victory, but framed ‘on the edge of the event’.
Scene 3 explored the responses of various groups to Armstrong’s
confession, which happened seven and a half years after the moment of
victory on the Champs-Élysées. In this scene not only has time moved far
from the event, but the characters also; no main character is present, not
even Armstrong. In this case we say the scene is framed ‘outside the
event’.
All these scenes build their own dramatic tension, and allow us to
explore different aspects of the story. The frame you choose depends upon
your specific question: Should cheats be rewarded? What is the price of
victory? What’s it like living a lie? (Or whatever your question is.) We can
show this in a diagram with our three scenes as examples. The line of
tension stretches away from the centre of the event, and it is that tension
which keeps our interest. Note how this line of tension moves from inner
frames (inside and on the edge of the event) to outer frames (outside the
event). You can use this diagram to plan the focus of any dramatic
situation and help you frame the action. When you are thinking about a
dramatic situation it will probably seem natural to you to go straight to the
heart of your central event, and so frame the drama inside the event.
However, as we have seen in this drama, that is not always possible, or
indeed effective. We will return to this in more detail in Chapter 13.
AND IN PLAYS …
HITLER’S DAUGHTER by Eva Di Cesare, Sandra
Eldridge and Tim McGarry, adapted from the
novel by Jackie French
This Australian play frames the action in different ways to create absorbing
and fascinating dramatic action. We have chosen two short extracts, the
first from the opening of the play. In this extract, the writers frame the
action in two quite distinct ways. Start by reading the Prologue and then
the beginning of Scene 1.
Before you begin there is important information embedded in the title of
the play: Hitler’s Daughter. Adolf Hitler was the ruthless and brutal leader
of Nazi Germany whose aggressive foreign policies plunged the world
into World War II from 1939 to 1945. So keep the title in mind as you try
to identify whether the action is framed ‘inside the event’, ‘on the edge of
the event’ or ‘outside the event’. The play starts with a Prologue, an
introduction to the dramatic story that here sets the emotional tone for the
play.
PROLOGUE
We hear HEIDI singing a gentle verse of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ in
German:

HEIDI: Funkel, funkel, kleiner Stern,

Ach wie bist du mir so fern,
Wunderschön und unbekannt,
Wie ein strahlend’Diamant,
Funkel, funkel, kleiner Stern,
Ach wie bist du mir so fern.
The lights come up to reveal HEIDI sitting on the ground in front
of one of the trees.
As the song finishes, the light fades and we hear heavy rain.
EXTRACT FROM SCENE 1
Early Tuesday morning.

The lights come up on a bus shelter somewhere in the Australian

countryside. The sound of heavy rain on the yellow tin roof of the bus
shelter. The crack of thunder and lightning. A car door slams. The car
drives off.

MARK, wet, appears and runs to the bus shelter. He stands alone.

We hear a cow mooing nearby.

BEN bolts into the bus shelter, soaked. His frenetic energy is the antithesis
of MARK’s stillness.

BEN: Hey, move your bag!

He throws his bag which hits the back wall of the shelter with a
thud.
Check out the creek. It’s gone yellow. The bridge’ll go if this
keeps up.
A flash of lightning.
MARK: Hey, Ben, have you ever noticed that cows look all shiny when
they’re wet?
BEN: Nuh.
He sneezes.
MARK: Like someone’s polished them. Do you think cows can sneeze?
BEN: Nuh.
MARK: How come they can’t, then?

BEN: Dunno.
MARK: Maybe they only sneeze when we’re not around.
BEN: Whatever?

BEN scrapes the mud off his boots.

MARK: It’s just they’re kind of sad looking—wet cows.
BEN: Hey, there’s Anna.

So, how is the Prologue framed? It is not yet clear exactly what is going on
—Heidi, a young girl, is sitting in front of a tree and singing ‘Twinkle
Twinkle Little Star’ in German. We can guess that it is probably ‘inside the
event’ (that this is actually Hitler’s daughter singing) or perhaps ‘on the
edge of the event’ (that the girl has a friend who claims to be Hitler’s
daughter).
The setting for Scene 1 is clear and detailed. We are in Australia, at a
rural bus stop, and it is raining. Two characters are introduced (both about
eleven years old, we later learn). Australia is half a world away, literally,
from any event that may have involved the possible daughter of the
monstrous Hitler. With this scene the playwrights have shifted the action to
‘outside the event’, giving no indication how it could be relevant to Hitler,
a daughter, or any events which may have occurred in Germany seventy
years earlier.

HITLER’S DAUGHTER: THE STORY

This play rests on an imaginative speculation, that Adolf Hitler, who never
had any children, was actually father to Heidi, a daughter. The play
cleverly builds on that fictional idea and sets out the story of Heidi’s adult
life. Arriving in Australia as a refugee after the war, Heidi studied, became
a doctor, and had children of her own, all the while never acknowledging
to anyone the name of her father. To tell this story the author created the
character of eleven year old Anna, who, we eventually come to
understand, is part of Heidi’s story. But this comes as a surprise and not
until the very end of the play.
Read this second extract from the final page of Hitler’s Daughter to see
how the authors framed the ending.

EXTRACT FROM SCENE 16

The bus is heard arriving, along with the soft beginning of rain.

MARK: Anna?
ANNA: Mmm?
MARK: Did … did Heidi ever tell anyone? About who her father was?
ANNA: How could she tell anyone? She’d have been hated, just like her father was
hated.
MARK: But it wasn’t her fault.
ANNA: Who’d have believed that? Besides she wanted a new life … a real life, like
everyone else, with a family and friends to laugh with.
MARK: You mean she kept quiet? She never told anyone at all? [Pause.] Anna?
ANNA: What?
MARK: I see why she couldn’t tell anyone. No-one would understand, not really.
She’d be afraid they’d see Hitler, not her.
ANNA: She’d just be Hitler’s Daughter. All her life …
MARK: I just thought … that maybe … maybe sometimes she couldn’t keep it to
herself. That she’d have to tell someone … just once.
ANNA: She told her granddaughter. Just once, like you said. One day when it was
raining, like today. It was just before she died. She told her all about
Fraulein Gelber and Frau Mundt and Frau Leib. But it was just a story. That’s
what she told her granddaughter. Only a story. Just pretend. That’s all.
MARK: Just pretend.

ANNA nods and she exits.

From off stage we hear HEIDI singing the last two lines of
‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ in German.
HEIDI: Funkel, funkel, kleiner Stern,
Ach wie bist du mir so fern.
MARK looks out.

The cows are mooing.

The lights fade to black.
THE END
This is a powerful moment in performance as Anna, the storyteller of the
play, shares a deep and very personal secret with Mark. If this whole tale
were true and Heidi did come to Australia and have children, then as
implied in the extract, could it be that Anna is the daughter of one of
Heidi’s children? Could it be that Anna, like Heidi and her mother, also
carries the stigma of being directly related to Hitler? Or, as her closing
lines would have it, is this all just a story—‘Just pretend’?
With this clever dramatic framing the authors wait until the final page of
the play to shift from being ‘outside the event’ to ‘inside the event’. Finally,
we are persuaded we are in the presence of Hitler’s great-granddaughter.
The suggestion that none of this may ever have happened, it was all make
believe, only adds further tension to the mystery of the play.

As You Prepare to Perform

The following activities workshop different ways in which a scene might be
framed. Begin by rehearsing the first extract (here) for performance. Think
about where you will place the three performers and run the lines and their
stage directions a few times. Then, try the following variations and after
each one discuss how the difference altered the framing of the action.
1. Perform the extract but sing the prologue in English not German.
2. Perform the extract but do not include any props or effects that place
Scene 1 in the Australian countryside, and try to underplay the script’s
colloquial Australian character, so that the scene could be taking
place in some other country.
3. Perform the extract as written but add something to indicate that the
Prologue is taking place after the war is over.
As we have noted, the second extract cleverly amplifies the mystery of the
play, leaving it unclear as to whether Heidi was the daughter of Hitler or
not. Reframe and replay this last page of the play twice, to make it clear
for the audience that:
1. Heidi definitely was Hitler’s daughter and Anna was his great-
granddaughter.
2. Heidi definitely was not Hitler’s daughter and that it really was all
 make believe, merely an engrossing story to entertain the children on
the bus.

Focusing the Dramatic Moment

There is another aspect of focus which is important for the clarity and
direction of your drama. Consider this account of a drama set up by some
fourteen-year-olds.
The class broke into three groups. One group was to be the kids in a
cafe, others decided to be bikies and all the rest became police. The
bikies came into the cafe and immediately became a problem. They
sat on tables and on the counter, hassled all of the customers and
started smashing things. Someone called the police and they ran in
and started arresting the bikies who fought back. Soon everyone was
in it with kids yelling and wrestling and running everywhere. Jason
got hurt when I stood on his hand.
Obviously this attempt at drama was a disaster. For this class, it became
just an excuse for fooling around. You can probably spot at least three
reasons why the piece went so wrong.
There hadn’t been any work done to develop roles or characters.
Should bikies and police automatically begin fighting? Don’t police
ride bikes too?
There had been no attempt to establish or develop tension—the
actions centred on empty conflict.
The group lacked a clear frame for their drama. In fact it was framed
inside the event—the moment of the brawl—and this framing actually
stopped the drama from developing.

Maintaining focus
There was another major weakness in that piece. The action was chaotic
and no single moment was clear. The participants were scattered around
the room, doing whatever they thought was fun. Only when we focus each
moment will the dramatic action have a clear centre from which tension
can develop. As a drama progresses, a sharp focus must be maintained
otherwise the action will become blurred and the direction of the drama
lost.
The best dramatic action is made up of a series of focused moments and
focused images. As creators of dramatic action you need techniques to
ensure this happens. There are at least eight important factors you must
manage effectively to maintain focus as the action advances. As you work
through these you may discover more.

Space
A thoughtful use of space helps maintain focus. Physical proximity,
grouping of characters and use of different levels are all means of focusing
action. A head of state arriving in a foreign country for an official visit will
appear alone at the top of the aircraft steps, walk down the red carpet to
the carefully arranged welcoming party, and pose for photographers.

ACTIVITY 2 SPACE
Remember the moment when Armstrong won that 2005 Tour de France?
Let’s revisit that and prepare for the medal giving ceremony. Construct
the winner’s podium. We will develop this activity further in a moment.

Places of special meaning

At times you will need to establish places of special meaning in your
drama. All participants will be familiar with the significance of such a
place, therefore any action that occurs there will take everyone’s attention
and focus the drama. Such an area may be:
the tribe’s sacred land
the gallows
the throne.

ACTIVITY 3 MAKING THE PLACE SPECIAL

Let’s now prepare for Armstrong’s gold medal ceremony by dressing the
set.
Select three people to be the gold, silver and bronze medal winners, and
 arrange them on the podium. Choose somebody to present the medals;
everyone else can take the role of other officials, fans, athletes, team
managers etc.
How many officials will you need to make the scene look authentic
and impressive? Where will they stand?
Decide exactly where everyone will stand and the distances
between them in order to keep the focus on the winner’s podium.
Note your positions, as they will be needed later.

Established patterns
Dramatic action can provide opportunities for characters to create things
to do that can be repeated regularly throughout the drama. For example:
at the factory, repetitive mime sequences can represent work tasks
sporting fans can develop a unified and ritual chant urging their team
to score
in-role, each participant may regularly post a Facebook update.
Once these patterns have been established, each time the characters
return to them, a clear focus for the action is ensured.

ACTIVITY 4 ESTABLISHING PATTERNS OF THE

CEREMONY
Back at the podium, return to the positions you had taken up. Establish
the exact sequence of words and movement for giving each prize.
Practise the ceremony once or twice, using these repeated patterns of
movement and language to create an imposing effect.

Properties and effects

Properties (props) are items essential to the dramatic action. When props
are introduced, especially if they are objects of significance, they serve to
focus everyone’s attention.
A key (‘This is the key to the treasury, it never leaves my side!’)
A diary (‘Don’t let my boyfriend see this!’)
 A letter (‘Please handle it carefully. It’s from my great-grandmother.’)

ACTIVITY 5 ADDING THE PROPS

Obviously, in a podium ceremony, the prizes are vital props. For our
ceremony, the prize included a cheque for $US500,000 for the winner,
while each medal-winner received a trophy. You will need to find or make
something to represent these.
How are these prizes featured? Resting on a cushion? Who is
holding them, and how, prior to presentation?
What would the three cyclists on the podium be wearing? The
second place getter was from Italy, the third from Germany. What
national colours would they be wearing? Remember the yellow
jersey for the winner of the Tour.
Find some appropriate music to add to the scene. When would it be
used?
With the props, costumes and music, repeat the ceremony.

Gesture and positioning

Any gesture which concentrates attention (for example pointing or
touching) also helps to establish focus. Gestures often sharpen physical
proximity. Gestures can be group things too, like the crowd all facing the
podium.

ACTIVITY 6 FOCUSING THE GESTURES

Now concentrate on the gestures of the three on the podium. How do you
ensure that the focus remains on each of them in their moment of
acclaim?
Are there family or friends in the crowd? Close by? Could one rider be
proudly holding his baby son or daughter?
When and how do they congratulate each other on the podium?
 Everyone should make suggestions for the three medallists to try out, to
help each of them achieve the most effective and distinctive gestures.

Eye contact
When teachers say ‘Look here everyone,’ they are securing the focus of
attention by insisting that everybody looks at the same thing. Just as in real
life, eye contact between individuals and within groups in a drama is an
important way of controlling and focusing the action.

ACTIVITY 7 MAKING MEANING FROM EYE CONTACT

Act out the whole scene again, incorporating the special gestures of the
medal winners at each key moment, enjoying their triumph—that’s
obvious enough, but what significant eye contact can you find? During
the scene, each medallist will be exchanging meaningful glances, and
perhaps just as significantly avoiding eye contact altogether. What eye
contact would they make with their partners, children, anti-doping
officials, journalists and with the more distant crowd?

Language and voice

In most dramatic action the person speaking is normally the centre of
attention, the focus. However, focus is determined not just by who is
speaking, but also by what is being said and the way it is being said. For
example, the person speaking the most loudly is often the centre of focus.

ACTIVITY 8 SHAPING LANGUAGE AND SOUND LEVELS

Now we will refine the language and voice for this scene. This will involve
planning and even scripting, because it is a formal occasion of historic
significance—the list of winners dates back to 1903. You will need to
decide:
Public address (PA) system announcements (you will need a
 speaker and microphone for this)
The formal congratulations to each presenter
What the medallists say to each other, how and where
A short speech by the winner.
You may wish to include some of Armstrong’s actual victory speech. (‘For
the cynics and the sceptics, I’m sorry you can’t think big. I’m sorry you
don’t believe in miracles. You should stand around and believe, you
should believe in these athletes. There are no secrets. This is a hard
sporting event and hard work wins it. Vive le Tour. Forever.’)
Now experiment with sound levels. The PA will easily command focus
so try it with the microphone and see what effect that has. Will someone
be almost inaudible and what effect will that have?
How is the general hubbub managed around these strong focuses?

Contrasts
Focus is also achieved through contrasting images, for example, when:
all players are moving quickly—except one who is still
all players are chanting softly—except one who speaks above the
chant
all players are in darkness—except one who is in the light.
The use of contrast is particularly effective for it incorporates a number of
the focusing techniques discussed earlier.

ACTIVITY 9 ADDING MEANING THROUGH CONTRAST

We have focused this scene of Armstrong’s ‘glorious’ triumph on the
winner’s podium, but what might the Tour’s drug-free competitors have
been doing while the winners received their prizes? Rumours that
Armstrong was cheating were strong and well-founded so how might the
clean but defeated riders behave during the ceremony?
1. Choose two or three students to play drug-free riders who
successfully completed the race but without honours. They are
 highly suspicious of Armstrong’s victory.
2. As a class, plan the contrasts between these riders and those who
are tainted or happily going along with the show. Draw on the seven
ways of maintaining focus we have already listed:
Space: Where are these riders placed in the crowd? How close
to each other? Which way are they facing?
Place of special meaning: Should they be close to the podium?
Established patterns: As each medal is presented what do they
do?
Properties: Can any prop emphasise their distress? How might
they use a prop, a water bottle for instance, to set them apart
from the crowd?
Gesture: What special gestures might they use, individually and
to each other?
Eye contact: Do they look at the medals as they are awarded?
When? Do they look at each other? When?
Voice and language: Do they say anything? To whom? How?
3. Plan the moments when the audience’s attention will switch to
these characters, and then back again to the main spectacle. Work
out how you will achieve this. Now try the scene one last time.
Believe in what you are doing and it will be powerful, because it is
now clearly focused and complete.

AND IN PLAYS …
OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR! by Joan Littlewood
In any good play or scene the action is clearly focused. The following
extract shows the very clever effect that can be created by sudden changes
of focus. Oh, What a Lovely War! is a play about World War I—with
‘songs, battles, and a few jokes’. Most of the songs are those the soldiers
sang in the trenches. This episode, a parody (a mocking imitation) of a
front-line church service, sets the scene for the slaughter of the Battle of
Arras and uses comedy to focus attention on the horror the soldiers are
about to face. Haig is the British Commander-in-Chief.

EXTRACT FROM ACT 2

HAIG, a CHAPLAIN, a NURSE and SOLDIERS come on.

CHAPLAIN: Let us pray.

All sing. sing their own version of the hymns. The
SOLDIERS
CHAPLAIN, HAIG, and the NURSE sing the correct words.
FORWARD JOE SOAP’S ARMY (Tune: ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’)

ALL: Forward Joe Soap’s army, marching without fear,

With our old commander, safely in the rear.

He boasts and skites from morn till night,
And thinks he’s very brave,
But the men who really did the job are dead and in their grave.
Forward Joe Soap’s army, marching without fear,
With our old commander, safely in the rear.
Amen.

***

CHAPLAIN:Let us pray. O God, show thy face to us as thou didst with thy
angel at Mons. The choir will now sing ‘What a friend we have in
Jesus’ as we offer a silent prayer for Sir Douglas Haig for success in
tomorrow’s onset.
WHEN THIS LOUSY WAR IS OVER (Tune: ‘What a friend we have in
Jesus’)
When this lousy war is over,
No more soldiering for me,
When I get my civvy clothes on,
Oh, how happy I shall be!
No more church parades on Sunday,
No more putting in for leave,
I shall kiss the sergeant-major,
How I’ll miss him, how he’ll grieve!
Amen.
 O Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy
word. Dismiss.
CORPORAL: [blowing a whistle] Come on, you men, fall in.
The SOLDIERS sing as they march off.

***

CHAPLAIN: Land of our birth, we pledge to thee, our love and toil in the
years to be.
HAIG: Well, God, the prospects for a successful attack are now ideal. I
place myself in thy hands.
CHAPLAIN: Into thy hands I commend my spirit.
NURSE: The fields are full of tents, O Lord, all empty except for as yet
unmade and naked iron bedsteads. Every ward has been cleared to
make way for the wounded that will be arriving when the big push
comes.
HAIG: I trust you will understand, Lord, that as a British gentleman I could
not subordinate myself to the ambitions of a junior foreign
commander, as the politicians suggested. It is for the prestige of my
King and Empire, Lord.
CHAPLAIN: Teach us to rule ourself alway, controlled and cleanly night and
day.
HAIG: I ask thee for victory, Lord, before the Americans arrive.
NURSE: The doctors say there will be enormous numbers of dead and
wounded, God.
CHAPLAIN: That we may bring if need arise, no maimed or worthless
sacrifice.
HAIG: Thus to grant us fair weather for tomorrow’s attack, that we may
drive the enemy into the sea.
NURSE: O Lord, I beg you, do not let this dreadful war cause all the
suffering that we have prepared for. I know you will answer my
prayer.
Explosion. They go off.
As You Prepare to Perform
THINK ABOUT
You will need to access the original words and tunes of the two hymns,
since the script only gives the soldiers’ mocking versions. If you do not
know the tunes, the music is easily accessible on versions of the musical.
Even before you start to rehearse, you can perhaps notice how, as the two
versions of the songs are being sung, the focus is deliberately split and
confused. Then, when the chorus of soldiers has gone off, the focus
becomes clear, switching quickly between the three figures, who are all
kneeling, but apart. The sudden jumps, from the pious platitudes of the
chaplain to the smug arrogance of Haig to the sincere anguish of the
nurse, all add to the telling contrast.
Note too that in this final section, the chaplain, the nurse and Haig are
all continuing their speeches as if they were speaking in isolation. If you
read only the chaplain’s lines, one after the other, you will see they are in
verse, and should be spoken that way.

TRY OUT THE SCENE

Play this scene as a whole class. Set it up as if in a makeshift church, with
the soldiers standing very smartly (though some of them might be
wounded). The chaplain, the nurse and Haig should stand well apart from
each other. The key characters should be singing the correct words while
the soldiers are singing their own versions. The better the songs are sung,
the more powerful the scene will be. Play it very straight and let the
humour do its own work.
When you have finished your performance, view this scene in a video
of the movie if you can, and watch carefully to see how the focus is shifted
with the help of cameras and editing.
chapter 4
place and space
All dramatic action occurs in space and time. Playwrights need to pay
careful attention to their setting—where the action takes place—as this can
greatly affect the events and tensions within the drama. While Star Wars
rages and ranges across whole galaxies, Hamlet is mainly set in a few
rooms of a castle. Both are about rulers and power and plots and war and
murder. Why such a difference in setting?
One answer would be that George Lucas had all the resources of film
and modern special effects at his disposal, while Shakespeare had only an
empty space. That is true, but it misses the point. The setting is far more
than the backdrop—it sets the tone as well as the scene for the dramatic
action, creates the atmosphere, influences characters and their actions,
and often dictates the audience’s point of view. For the plots and intrigues
of Star Wars, George Lucas creates a grand, colourful telescopic picture;
Shakespeare encloses his for microscopic scrutiny within a forbidding,
claustrophobic fortress.

ACTIVITY 1 BRAINSTORM
Either as a whole class, or in smaller groups, discuss any plays, TV shows
and films that some or all of you have seen, where the setting struck you
 as a really distinctive and significant part of the action. Brainstorm some
of these productions to see if you can work out why the setting was so
effective. To start your discussion, consider these two questions:
1. Why do many scenes in TV cop shows feature crucial conversations
taking place while the characters are walking fast along police
station corridors (which you might think could be distracting to the
audience)?
2. God of Carnage by Yazmin Reza is a play about an incident involving
one child bullying another, but it does not even show the bullying
incident itself, nor either of the children. The entire play is set in a
civilised lounge room, where we see the two sets of parents
gradually become less and less civilised and more and more
childish. Can you guess why this setting was chosen?
Consider a range of contrasting settings, and examine how the story is
enriched by that setting. Look too at how actors work differently
according to the setting—with more or less movement, louder or softer
voices.

The Setting
Suppose you create a drama called Leaving Home to explore the
love/hate relationship between a girl and her father, which leads to the
girl leaving home. What differences would there be if you set the moment
when the girl announces she is leaving home:
in the family home with everyone gathered for her birthday?
in the dining hall of a hostel where, as newly arrived migrants, they
have been living for some weeks?
during an interstate holiday they are having together?

Framing and setting

How you intend to frame the action is, of course, clearly connected to your
setting. Remember our Drugs in Sport drama. If you had the resources to
make a film, you might make regular use of the long road and
conversations in the peloton (the main group of riders in a race), and build
the tension for the medal ceremony by showing the final triumphant leg
along the Champs-Élysées. On a stage you can at least show the moment
of the medal presentation for maximum effect—as you have.

ACTIVITY 2 SHE’S LEAVING HOME

1. Take the idea for the Leaving Home drama and, as a class, choose
one of the three settings outlined above—or make up another if you
prefer.
2. Divide into six groups. Referring to the ‘Framing the action’ diagram
here, assign two groups to each of the three frames for the first
scene: inside, on the edge, and outside the event (so that each
frame will be illustrated by two different groups). Each group should
seek to find the most appropriate and effective setting for a scene in
which:
the father and daughter row about her boyfriend (inside the
event)
the girl is confiding to a friend about her problems with her
father (on the edge)
two neighbourhood gossips discuss the girl’s departure
(outside the event).
3. When you have decided on your setting, pick two members of your
group to act the two characters and create twenty to thirty seconds
of dramatic action, either:
the very beginning of the scene, which sets it up for the
audience, or
a moment within the scene where that setting becomes very
significant.
4. Briefly rehearse that moment, then each group in turn present it to
the others. As you watch, compare the two groups illustrating the
same frame, and try to see ways where you could make that
physical setting even more significant. Discuss these suggestions.
Playing with Place
Different settings will dictate which other characters might be introduced.
Certain settings will intensify the action, while the use of contrasting
settings will help build the dramatic tension.
There are four aspects of place that you should keep in mind when
choosing the best setting for each scene, and for the drama as a whole.

1. Other characters
Your setting may dictate or restrict the range of other characters you can
use in your drama. It may also suggest minor characters you can
introduce. For example, if you set Leaving Home in:
the family home at the birthday gathering—you could include well-
meaning or interfering relatives
a migrant hostel—you could bring in an unsympathetic official, or
residents from other cultures with different customs between fathers
and daughters
on the interstate holiday—on a plane or a tour bus there could be
strangers sitting next to you.
And you may already have thought of some of these.

ACTIVITY 3 ADDING CHARACTERS

Go back to your six groups. Look again at the place you have chosen to
set your scene. Who else is likely to be around, or might enter and
interrupt? Choose one or more new characters, depending on the
numbers in your group, who could have an effect on the way the action
develops. Bring in these new characters to enrich the scene,
incorporating these new roles.

2. Closed and open settings

Most of Hamlet is set in a closed, gloomy castle, which intensifies the
fears, hates and the struggle for power. Not all dramas are so intense, and
a more open and spacious setting may allow more variety in the action. A
drama about Robin Hood, for example, could be set in the same closed
location of the Baron’s castle, but it could equally be set in medieval
Nottingham, where the townspeople would have their separate homes,
their trades and their family concerns. Medieval marketplaces are full of
visitors, traders, pedlars, soldiers and vagabonds; townspeople go on
pilgrimages; they have festivals and face outbreaks of plague. The more
open the location, the more chance there is of the outside world affecting
the action.

ACTIVITY 4 OPEN AND CLOSED

1. Return to your six Leaving Home drama groups and think about the
place you have chosen to set it. Discuss how open or closed the
setting is. Now experiment with setting it at the other end of the
scale—maybe adding more characters or taking some away.
Exercise some imagination. Does it work more effectively, or not so
well, and how much do you need to use your imagination to change
the action, or even the outcome? Decide which version of your
scene you prefer, and use that as the basis for the next task, which
will really challenge your group.
2. Now, with a big leap of imagination, put your group’s drama into the
time, place and setting of Robin Hood. Your girl leaving home is now
Maid Marian, off to join Robin and his band of Merry Men, which
would horrify her father!
3. If you don’t know the stories of Robin Hood, you’ll find plenty of them
online, and many films. Make a list of the various settings that are
used, and divide these into open and closed locations.
4. The stories don’t agree who Maid Marian’s father was (some say a
poor villager, some a rich merchant, some a nobleman; he might
even be the Sheriff of Nottingham). You can invent the details,
keeping them as close as you can to your original scene. Why is the
girl (Maid Marian) leaving, how do she and her father get on, and
what story will she tell him to explain her leaving? Now decide on a
setting for the scene that is roughly equivalent to your preferred
 version of your original scene (open and with other characters, or
closed). Can you find a setting in Robin Hood’s England that would
be just as powerful?

3. Contrasting settings
Films often make use of the contrast between closed and open locations to
help establish mood and meaning. You can see it in many famous films:
the Australian comedy Crocodile Dundee is a story in two halves, set in
two contrasting places, and the characters are defined by the location they
belong in. The first part, croc hunter Dundee’s territory, is the vast, wide
Australian outback, where people are solitary, small figures; the local town
is deserted, and even the sprawling pub is half-empty. In the second half
the action shifts to New York city, where the screen is perpetually crowded
with people in the frantic bustle of the streets and subways. Many other
screen classics make powerful use of the contrast between closed and
open settings, including almost any Hitchcock thriller.
Can you think of any contemporary films, TV series or perhaps online
dramatic worlds that use the same device of alternating contrasting
settings, open and closed?
Another play of Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, is almost a mirror
image of Crocodile Dundee. It too is a story in two halves: a tale of
ageing jealousy, cruelty and suffering that is finally overcome by young
love, generosity and joy. The first half is set in the city, in a rich but gloomy
court, and, as the title suggests, in winter (‘a sad tale’s best for winter’).
King Leontes goes mad with unprovoked jealousy, and finally condemns to
death his faithful wife Hermione and banishes her newborn baby. The
second half begins somewhere totally different, on a lonely foreign shore
where the king’s dutiful courtier Antigonus leaves the baby to be eaten by
wolves or bears. Here, in a wonderfully bizarre reversal, Shakespeare
gives us one of his few definite stage directions: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’
… which is the fate of the unfortunate Antigonus. His death is watched
with interest by a poor shepherd and his son, who take pity on the baby
and take her home with them, giving her the name Perdita—‘the lost one’.
The time jumps forward sixteen years, and the rest of the play takes place
in glorious summer sunshine, in the countryside among flowers and songs
and festivals … and of course, young love and forgiveness triumph in the
end, with a whole lot of magical surprises.
In our combined Leaving Home/ Robin Hood drama, switching scenes
among multiple locations would enable us to explore many aspects of the
situation. One scene could be set in the village (open), another in Robin’s
hideout in Sherwood Forest (closed); one in the marketplace in
Nottingham (open) and one in Maid Marian’s bedroom with her sister or
maidservant (closed).

ACTIVITY 5 CONTRASTING SETTINGS

Wherever you set the scene of Maid Marian breaking the news to her
father, now think about what the next scene might be, in which the action
and setting would create a complete contrast.

4. Messages of place
Many settings carry with them very strong associations: things we expect
to be in that place and events we expect to happen there. Despite both
being set in halls, the expectations of a migrant hostel dining hall, for
instance, are different from those of a reception hall hired for a birthday
party, and these associations will add to your drama. But you also need to
deal with the physical constraints of the setting—what can you do in a bus
or an aircraft? What can’t you do?
You can also play powerfully with the audience’s expectations:
by emphasising what is happening with the appropriateness of the
setting
by exactly the opposite, where the action contrasts with our
expectations of the place. This sets up a tension of surprise between
what we expect and what is actually happening.

ACTIVITY 6 MESSAGES OF PLACE

Using what you know or can guess about medieval life, look again at your
two scenes from the activities above: the scene where Marian tells her
father she is leaving home, and the contrasting next scene. Can you find
 an even better setting for those scenes, where the meanings associated
with the setting enrich the scene, either by emphasising the
appropriateness of the setting for the action, or by clashing vividly with
it. For example, if you had decided that Maid Marian is the daughter of a
nobleman:
an appropriate setting if she breaks the news to him quietly would
be in her flower garden, with just her faithful maid to back her up.
a contrasting setting would be if she breaks the news to him during
a celebration dance or May Day festival.

The Empty Space

‘The empty space’ is a phrase coined by theatre director Peter Brook to
remind us of the essential thing that every piece of drama needs—an
empty space that is going to be made special so that it can become filled
by the imagination of the actors and audience.
Every society has had its own ways of making the space special. Our
society’s ‘special space’ for drama is of course a ‘theatre’. Since most
drama in the western world sharply divides the participants into audience
and actors, the theatre space has developed to help that process. With a
stage for the actors and seats for the audience, the real world and the
fiction can’t become confused. (There is a famous incident in the American
West where a gallant but misguided cowboy in the audience ‘saved’ the
heroine by actually shooting the actor playing the villain!)
The space between the actors and the audience is sometimes known as
the fourth wall, and many theatres are still designed with a proscenium
arch and curtains, so the audience are unmistakeably looking through an
invisible fourth wall. If you think about it, that is exactly how drama works
in films, television and computer screens—the audience can’t walk through
the screen to join in the action … normally.
Of course, you are probably saying, ‘Ah but what about multiplayer
video-dramas and virtual worlds?’ And indeed, on screen and in live
drama too, there are ways of disrupting that separation of actors and
audience. In fact, modern western drama could be said to have started
with priests dramatising bits of the Christian Bible, in church and in the
service itself, the congregation (audience) joining in as a chorus (known as
‘the responses’). The church was already a sacred ‘special space’,
beautifully designed physically and acoustically to be a magical
performance place.
Over the years this kind of biblical drama (known as Miracle Plays)
grew so big that the audience themselves took the stories out of the church
and into the streets on festival days, and so became the actors. That was a
challenge, because streets and marketplaces were designed for entirely
different purposes, so the players built street stages to tell the stories on or
took over the whole street with a procession, or pageant, where the plays
were performed on moving carts.
Still today, many theatre and drama makers find ways of disrupting that
total separation between actors and audience—and even between the
dramatic fiction and the participants’ real lives. This drama has several
forms, for instance:
promenade, street or site-specific theatre are forms of drama where a
place other than a purpose-built theatre is chosen and made special
participatory, forum and playback theatre are some of the forms
where the audience takes part in the drama.
More detailed descriptions of some of these important kinds of
contemporary theatre can be found in Chapter 12, but if you think about
it, that’s exactly what you are doing now (though you may not have
noticed!)—as that’s what process drama is: combining participants and
audience in one.
You are probably spending at least some of your classes in a classroom
or a hall that is used for many other things besides drama, so you have
already faced the challenges in making that space special for drama, and
of making it specially suited for any particular drama. In this section we
look at how your classroom or hall can be best arranged as a drama
space, for your drama work generally, and for each specific drama. With
just a few resources and a large enough space, you can create a good,
workable studio. Setting your space up thoughtfully can give you a lot
more scope to make your dramas more successful.

Creating a drama studio: a space for contrasts

Space is not just a static and unchanging thing: as soon as people enter
an empty space there is action. Dramatic action always consists of
movement (along with other things) and, in contrast, stillness.
Movement/stillness is one of the three key dramatic contrasts, and you can
use the whole spectrum in between as a vital part of dramatic effect. Your
space therefore needs to allow the opportunity for that contrast, and for a
range of movements right across the spectrum.
Rostra blocks (sturdy boxes of different shapes, sizes and heights) help
you create different levels. If you can’t get these, strong tables, desks and
chairs will do. Bed sheets or lengths of hessian can be spread out to mark
territory, or suspended to form walls.
Space is above all a visual and visible element, core of the second of
the key dramatic contrasts— light/darkness. Therefore it is also a great
help if you can black out your space. You may also have access to a
simple lighting rig. This will give you much more flexibility to focus the
attention where you want it.
The third key dramatic contrast and spectrum is sound/silence. This will
be partly manifest in the language, and in the eloquent silences and
pauses in between. And as almost any current film or television program
demonstrates, sound—and almost invariably music—forms a vital part of
the dramatic effect. So you should also be able to play audio, and have
access to the internet and projection facilities.
In all, your drama space must be a flexible working area, and you need
to feel free to arrange it to suit your purposes.

Arranging the space

When you have decided on the setting for your drama, consider how best
to set up your space to create that location.
How much space is necessary to create that setting? If the action is set
in an aeroplane, you could limit the space to the real dimensions of
an aircraft cabin.
What does the setting dictate about the organisation of space? In a
waiting room, for example, chairs are often arranged back to back;
in an aircraft, they are separated by an aisle.
Does the drama need a large space for a whole-group activity to
focus the group, such as a marketplace or a corroboree meeting
ground?
Would the use of different levels help focus the action or suggest
power? A drama set on a ship could use levels to distinguish the
bridge from the engine room.
 Do you need a section of the space that cannot be observed for
moments of secrecy and privacy?
How much space separates areas? What about private areas—can
people overhear what happens in private settings?
Do all participants have access to all of the spaces? Which areas are
high status—the boss’s office, the throne-room? Which are low?

ACTIVITY 7 SET DESIGN

1. Break into four groups: A, B, C and D. Each group is going to design a
stage set within your drama studio, for a particular location or
setting.
2. Groups A and B are each to design a setting for a drama with a cast
of at least twelve. The action takes place in an isolated island resort,
where a tsunami has left them stranded, without electricity or the
possibility of rescue, for at least two weeks. The rest of the resort is
still flooded, so they have all been herded together into the games
room or gymnasium, with perhaps an adjacent side room.
3. Groups C and D are each to design a setting for a drama that takes
place in Asgard, the home of the most important gods in Norse
mythology. Asgard was depicted as an enormous fortress in the sky
with individual dwellings for the lords who lived there. Full of
fabulous riches, it was built of splendid materials, which were
particularly handsome in the great council and banquet hall, the
Halle. (If your group doesn’t have an expert on Norse myth, you may
like to do some further background research.)
4. In designing your setting, consider the following points.
What kind of drama might be likely to happen in your location (a
story suitable for a flooded island resort is likely to be very
different from one fit for Asgard)? Brainstorm a few possible
scenes.
What kind of characters could be part of the drama, and how
might the setting affect the action?
 How open or closed is your location, and how much leeway do
you have to vary it?
Both of these settings convey quite strong messages of the
space. Think about what these are, and how you can take
advantage of them in your drama.
5. You may want to commit your ideas to paper, in the form of simple
sketches. Then create a basic set design for your group that can be
projected for the rest of the class to see. There are many set design
software applications available, some of them quite simple to use
and free, or you can use the graphic tools in Word, PowerPoint or
similar universal applications.
6. Now make this tangible. In turn, Groups A and B set up your isolated
resort in the space, and explain to the rest of the class why you
made the decisions you did. The other groups should carefully note
the similarities and differences between the two designs: which
setting has the richer possibilities for action? Why?
7. Repeat the process with Groups C and D, comparing the two Asgards.

AND IN PLAYS …
HITLER’S DAUGHTER by Eva Di Cesare, Sandra
Eldridge and Tim McGarry, based on the novel by
Jackie French
This scene is from the play we introduced in the last chapter. The outer
frame is the same: the children waiting in the shelter for the school bus, in
the rain, and Anna telling her strange story. In this scene, the inner frame
is Germany during the war, with Hitler in trouble and his army in retreat—
though Heidi still thinks her ‘Duffi’ is all-powerful.

EXTRACT FROM SCENE 6

The bus shelter. Continual heavy rain can be heard.

MARK: This is never gonna stop. It’s gonna go on and on and all the cars
 will float away and we’ll have to catch a boat to school.
TRACEY: Really?
MARK: Of course not really. Hey, Anna … I was wondering … have you
told anyone else this story? The Hitler story?
ANNA: No. It’s just between us.
TRACEY: Yeah … our little secret.

Pause.
MARK: Are you going to tell us more?

Pause.
ANNA: It was soon after Heidi asked about the Jews, that they had to move
house.

Germany. Autumn 1944. Berchtesgaden. HEIDI’s bedroom. The lights

change.

HEIDI: Why do we have to go?

FRAULEIN GELBER waves a letter at HEIDI, too quickly for HEIDI to
read it.
Is it from Duffi?
FRAULEIN GELBER shrugs her head and hides the letter in her
pocket.
Where are we going to?
FRAULEIN GELBER: We will look it up on the map in the car. It will be a nice
place. You will like it.
HEIDI: A car! But why do we have to go?

FRAULEIN GELBER: It will be safer there … and it’s much nearer my family.
HEIDI: Will they visit us?

FRAULEIN GELBER: I don’t think they’ll visit.

HEIDI: Will Duffi visit? Will he be at the new house?

FRAULEIN GELBER: No of course not. He is in Berlin. Driver?

HEIDI: But he will visit?

FRAULEIN GELBER: Vielleicht—perhaps. [Calling offstage] Driver, the cases!

 The driver enters carrying suitcases. They get into the car.
FRAULEIN GELBER: How long is the drive?

DRIVER: One hour.

They drive.
HEIDI: Look Fraulein, goats. [To the DRIVER] Can we stop?
FRAULEIN GELBER: Shush. You mustn’t talk to the driver.
Silence.

***

HEIDI: Why does that house have cardboard for windows?

DRIVER: Stray bombs. Sometimes they have a few spare they haven’t
dropped on targets so they drop them anywhere. They don’t use so
much fuel carrying them home.
HEIDI: Where is home?
DRIVER: England. England is the enemy.

HEIDI: Are they evil people or just stupid! How can they possibly win
against all of Germany—against Duffi?

The bus shelter. The lights change. The two scenes run concurrently.

MARK: So the Germans thought the English were evil?

HEIDI: Will we make it our new home?
MARK: But didn’t they know?

HEIDI: England is the enemy.

The DRIVER parks the car. He exits with the cases.

MARK: But Hitler was the evil one.

Germany. Autumn 1944. A farmhouse in the woods. The lights change.

FRAULEIN GELBER:
This new house is small. But it has three bedrooms upstairs.
One for me, one for you, Heidi, and the third will be our schoolroom.
MARK: But the Germans bombed England, didn’t they?
FRAULEIN GELBER: There is a cellar you can go to out the kitchen door and
down some steps. Bombs may crush the house, but the cellar will be
safe.
HEIDI: Look at all these jars of plum jam and sauerkraut and honey. So
much food. Where are the people who lived here before?
FRAULEIN GELBER: That’s none of our business.
[The scene continues]

As You Prepare to Perform

In this very complex scene we are concentrating on the use of place and
space. This is a challenging piece, and some of the challenges may not be
obvious at first, so we will introduce them gradually.
Get into groups of at least six, for the six characters in the scene.
The first challenge is that this single scene demands four quite
contrasting settings—the bus shelter, the grand mansion at Berchtesgaden
(Hitler’s Bavarian holiday home), a moving car and an old farmhouse. At
one point there is action and dialogue going on in two of them at the
same time. On film this could easily be shot by using four real locations
and intercutting, but you are working in a single space, with few props,
simple lighting and sound effects, and no changing backdrops. This is
Peter Brook’s ‘empty space’. You have to become designers as well as
performers, and plan your use of the space carefully so that the audience
can follow the rapid changes from one setting to another without
becoming confused.
You will need to use what you have learned about each of the four
aspects of space to help make things clear for the audience. There are
many useful clues in the text to help you.
1. Start by drawing a diagram of your acting space, and working out
where the basic action needs to happen: how much space each
setting needs, how your actors will use it, and which section of the
space will be used for which part of the action. Remember that three
of the settings come from the same (inner) frame, and that the bus
 shelter is in the outer frame. If there is enough space for all the groups
to work without bumping into each other, you may find it helpful to
walk this through. Designate the space you can use, and try out some
positioning and key movements (this process is called blocking) from
one setting to another, book in hand.
2. What simple furniture or props, and perhaps plain rostra blocks,
would be helpful to indicate the four settings?
3. Note that the script indicates some lighting changes. Where and
why? If your classroom or drama studio has some lighting, try
working out some simple changes that would help the audience follow
the action.
4. Now think about how, just by the use of movement, acting skills and
perhaps lights, you can create a sense of the very distinctly different
‘messages of the space’—the grand mansion, the car, the bus shelter,
the farmhouse.
5. Now you have worked that out, and perhaps rehearsed the scene a
bit with book in hand, here is the next challenge. In the first
production of the play, by Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People,
there were only four actors playing all the roles—one of them actually
played six different parts. In this scene, one actor was doubling the
roles of Tracey and Heidi, and another played Anna and Fraulein
Gelber.
Consider the effect this doubling up will have on the scene
settings you have chosen. How can those two actors move quickly
and efficiently from one frame to another? You might find it helpful
to consider the props they are using, or easily changed items of
costume. These can immediately convey the shift in-role.

THE MISSING EXTRACT

There is one final challenge. You may have noticed a set of three asterisks
in the middle of the script, in the part where Heidi and Fraulein Gelber are
in the car. These represent an important piece of the action that we chose
to leave out so that you didn’t have too much to deal with at once. Here it
is:

Silence.
The humming of an aeroplane.
 The humming gets louder.
The DRIVER pulls the car off into the gravel.
FRAULEIN GELBER: Perhaps we should just get out and lie on the ground.
What if they see the car?
DRIVER: Too late.

Terrified, HEIDI cranes to look. FRAULEIN GELBER pulls her back.

They hold each other. The DRIVER braces for the bomb to fall.
As the plane approaches louder, its black shadow crosses
them from above. The plane’s engine fades to a hum.
They relax from their brace positions. The DRIVER starts the car
and the journey continues.

6. Here, one more theatrical tool is introduced: sound effects (SFX).

Sound effects can be very important in helping to convey particular
messages of the place, bring the setting to life and in this case
considerably magnify the tension. If you can, source the relevant
sound effects of a World War II bomber flying overhead then
fading away, and perhaps that of a car pulling over. Experiment
with how you can most vividly increase the tension and terror of
that moment, using sound effects as well as your own skills in acting
and movement.
7. Is there anywhere else in the scene where the use of sound effects
could help enrich the messages of the place, and assist you in
differentiating between the four settings? Experiment with various
effects.
chapter 5
time
Look at any photograph, picture or sculpture of a group of people, and
you see their relationships in that moment frozen forever.

ACTIVITY 1 POSTCARDS WARM-UP

We will start with a game of Postcards, using the class to make two
‘frozen’ picture postcards. The first is captioned, ‘An Asian Market’ (if you
haven’t seen one live you can research it).
Everyone stands in a circle. A volunteer steps into the circle and takes
up the pose of a person or an object likely to be found in such a market,
announcing clearly who or what they are representing, then freezing.
One at a time, others step in, taking up their position as person or object,
perhaps connected with the first, perhaps not, each time announcing
who or what they are. Don’t rush. Before you step in, look to see what
should be there and is missing; look for spaces and different levels to
occupy, so the picture can be interesting and well composed. Not
everybody has to step in, or it may get too crowded.
When this has been ‘snapped’, go back to the circle and make another
picture postcard: ‘Busy Harbour Scene’.
Any moment that is special enough to be frozen in an image raises
questions about all Five Ws, and some others.
What’s happening, when and where?
Who are the people, what are they to each other, and what has
brought them to this moment?
What is at stake for them?
What happens next and why?
What does it mean?
Bring that moment to life and we have drama.

Narrative
We can explore the people, their story, and what’s at stake for them in
order to answer the questions above. But there is one other very important
question: How does their story come to matter to us? Almost all drama and
theatre is made up of a story, or narrative. The events in a narrative are
not random, but linked in sequence by cause and effect. We shall be
dealing further with this in the next chapter, but it is worth bearing in mind
here as we explore events, their causes and effects, and characters and
their motives.
ACTIVITY 2 LOOKING WITH CARE
1. Look carefully at the painting here. Enlarge the image if you can, to
at least A3 size or, better still, project it onto a wall. It might lose
some quality, but what at first may look like scrawls will quickly
begin to take recognisable and meaningful shape. This painting
freezes a very significant moment in time—significant to the painter
himself, and, as it happens, to world history. It is also significant to
Australia, and to many people in your school and community—
though this may not be immediately apparent.
There is a story behind this painting, which is told in fractured
images and patterns and shapes and colours. Working in groups of
two or three, take five minutes to discuss and perhaps list what you
can see in the painting. What ideas come to your mind about the
Five Ws? What might be happening, where and when? Can you see
people or fragments of people? What other images might be
important, and what do the choice of colours and depiction of light
suggest? Take the painting seriously, and don’t be afraid to guess
and speculate.
2. When your ideas start coming together in a possible story, compare
notes with other groups and see what they have come up with.
Now we will help you piece together, and explore dramatically, the
particular story this painting depicts. It is a story that is likely to ring
bells for some of you, or, more particularly, your parents and
grandparents. If the story your group invented was different, that
does not mean you were wrong, because the painting is also telling
an emotional story that is transferable to other human contexts.
To begin, here is another image, a well-known photograph of the
same historic moment, that is more easily comprehended than the
painting.
 3. In your groups of three, use this photograph together with the
painting to shed more light on the story in the painting, which is also
the artist’s own story. It may help to know that the artist’s name is
L.K. Anh Tuan, and the painting is called Farewell Saigon. You may
have noticed a date in the painting. That day, 30 April 1975, is
commonly known as ‘the Fall of Saigon’. In your groups research this
phrase online, and see what you can find out about that time and
place. There are likely to be students in the class whose parents or
grandparents were involved in that conflict, and who can share what
they know with the class.

Time in Art and Time in Drama

These two images have frozen a moment in time to give it significance,
and show us what’s happening, where and when, who to, and what’s at
stake. However, unlike paintings and photographs, drama, like film, works
through the passage of time, and so it can take us further: to show what
led up to, and what came out of that moment. This is the stuff of narrative.
Drama can also tell us much more about the who in the pictures, and this
is what we are going to explore in the extended process drama in this
chapter.

ACTIVITY 3 DIGGING FOR FACTS

But first, this drama demands at least a rudimentary knowledge of the
facts of what Australians today know as the Vietnam War, and the
Vietnamese know as the American War. At the very least, you need to
know and be able to refer to the historical details here.
We can make this learning relatively painless by using a leader-in-role
in a hot-seat activity that helps you establish a real and personal
engagement with that far-off historical event. In this activity, the leader-
in-role takes the hot-seat and answers questions fired at them by the
participants. This means that he or she must know the historical material
in advance.
The hot-seat will normally be taken by the teacher, though if the class
is older or experienced in process drama, the leader could be a confident
student, well-prepared in advance, or even a student from another class
who is familiar with the material.
To get this information across to the class in a memorable way, the
leader will take on the role of an elderly Vietnamese person who lived
through most or all of those events, from 1954 at least. The rest of you
will play modern-day interviewers—journalists looking for a human
interest story that can frame the whole story of the Vietnam War.
The leader-in-role should also prepare their own backstory (the details
fleshing out their character and situation), to provide an interesting
account of ordinary life in those turbulent times, including how their
family survived the war, with any added information that helps make the
story come alive. For an example, here is the backstory of the leader-in-
role in one group that ran this activity:
Khiêm (which means ‘modesty’), was the son of a baker in Saigon who
 had learned from the French occupation how to bake white bread. The
family ran a market bakery stall, which was very successful in the 1960s
while there were plenty of foreign troops around. But Khiêm knew that
the business would be taken over by the State after re-unification, and
worse, the family might be punished as collaborators. So they had
escaped to Australia after the fall of Saigon, and (like many similar
families) made a new life here in their old trade.
This backstory will emerge as the leader-in-role answers questions.
The activity needs to be set up carefully, with the journalists building
belief in their roles as journalists with their own back stories—Why do
you need to get this story? What has made your paper or magazine
decide to run an article on that war, just now? What is the paper’s angle
on the information? Allow sufficient time to prepare some good
questions to ask the old man or woman, relating to your particular
mission. The journalists’ chairs should be grouped round the hot-seat in a
horseshoe shape. Or, rather than a mass press conference, you may
choose to run it as a Role Circle activity (see here), where all the
interviewers play the same role.
The tone of the interview needs to be mild, and the questioning
sympathetic, as the journalists probe the old person’s memories, both
happy and unhappy. The emotional impact of the exercise will increase
considerably if the leader-in-role makes the answers hard to come by:
perhaps he or she is shy, or still suspicious, or has a failing memory.
After the interview, journalists, discuss the stories you will write, and
the angle you will take, comparing them with the facts below. If you have
time and are interested, write the stories.

The historical facts

From 1945 to 1975, Vietnam (find it on a map, if you don’t know where it
is) was almost continuously at war. These are important dates in the
struggle.
1945–54 War of Independence against France (who had American help).
1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu. France was defeated and Vietnam was
divided into: North Vietnam (backed by China; communist, under
 General Ho Chi Minh; capital: Hanoi) and South Vietnam (backed
by the USA; capitalist, under General Diem; capital: Saigon).
1958 South Vietnam refused reunification talks.
North Vietnamese army started infiltrating the South.
Southern communists formed the Viet Cong guerrilla army.
1962 USA sent 12,000 ‘military advisers’ to help South Vietnam.
1965 USA sent 200,000 combat troops to South Vietnam.
Australia introduced conscription by lottery.
1968 480,000 US and Australian combat troops in Vietnam.
In spite of huge losses, especially of civilians and North
Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnam did not weaken.
1971 US and Australian troops started withdrawing in the face of
increasing pressure of public opinion at home.
1972 US and Australian troops all departed. South Vietnam fought on
until 1975.
1975 30 April 1975, Saigon fell. North Vietnam had won the war and
the country was reunified under communism.
The painting and the photograph we looked at earlier in the chapter show
the moment of Saigon’s fall, and the desperate scramble of many South
Vietnamese and remaining foreigners to escape the victorious North
Vietnamese army.

The Refugee Family Drama

Scene 1: Our home under threat!
PRELIMINARIES
Search and find some internet pictures of a normal Vietnamese city
market of today. Discuss briefly what kinds of people are visible, and who
else might be present on an ordinary day. Not much will be different from
1975, but what might be? The vehicles? What would have been on the
odds and ends stalls instead of mobile phone cases? Might some of the
food stalls be different? In 1975 there was a war on up-country—might
there be some soldiers on leave?
SITUATION
A busy market in Saigon, in February 1975, six weeks before the Fall of
Saigon.
ROLES
Some market traders and ordinary citizens of Saigon.
MANAGEMENT
As a whole class, make a clear space in which to set up the market,
surrounding shops, a central thoroughfare, etc. and mark it out with
rostra or chairs. As you do so, think about what role you would like to take
—stallholders, customers, porters, wholesalers, security, beggars,
soldiers—individually or at most in twos and threes. Check with other
individuals and groups that you are not all choosing the same roles but
have a full range.

Scene 1A: Market day

Get into position to start a scene depicting everyday life in the market.
Don’t try to be too clever or melodramatic, it’s just an ordinary day. On a
countdown, start the scene, and run it for a couple of minutes, so you all
get a sense of the rhythms of this place.

Scene 1B: Gossip

But not quite everything is normal. For three years, since the Americans
and Australians left, nothing had changed … but now, suddenly, there
are rumours that the war on the border with North Vietnam is going badly,
and here in the South the Communist guerrillas, the Viet Cong, are
becoming more active and dangerous. Meanwhile, the government
newspapers say the war is going well and the country is safe.
CONSTRAINT
Let each person come up with a rumour they might have heard in the
street, or read in a letter from a friend at the air-base in Danang or
smuggled from a relative across the border in say Hanoi or Haiphong in
North Vietnam. The rumour might be about:
a battle
the Northern advance
living conditions in communist North Vietnam.
Create a rumour that will add to the tension as people fear for their
future.
Start the scene again, and try to recreate the atmosphere of that
market … then, whenever you get the opportunity, pass on your rumour.
Listen avidly to any rumours that you hear, and pass those on too.
After three to five minutes, cut the drama.

Scene 1C: Loose lips cost lives

CONSTRAINT
Now add one more factor that will make a difference to that scene. There
are rumours that the Viet Cong are secretly infiltrating Saigon. Nobody
really knows who they are. Perhaps they are in this very marketplace,
spreading false rumours. There are very few people you can trust.
Close your eyes, and the teacher will tap three people on the shoulder.
These are secret agents for the Viet Cong, and even their closest friends
and relatives do not know this. Their job is to sniff out possible Viet Cong
sympathisers, and perhaps spread misleading news … but they
absolutely must not arouse suspicion. The rest of you are desperate for
news, but you don’t want to take risks when the Viet Cong may be about.
Re-run the scene, and this time, only pass rumours on to those people
you feel you can absolutely trust. Make sure that people you don’t know
can’t overhear—not easy in this very public space!
REFLECTION
Out-of-role, discuss the differences between the two versions of the
scene. Have the rumours changed in the retelling? Those who played Viet
Cong agents, what was noteworthy for you comparing the two scenes?

Scene 2: We must leave our home!

PRELIMINARIES
Divide into groups of four or five. There needs to be an even number of
groups, which will be important later in the drama.

Scene 2A: Planning the escape

SITUATION
30 April 1975—Invasion, the fall of Saigon and mass flight.
ROLES
The market people and their families.
One person in each group, A (not one of the Viet Cong spies), will keep
their original adult role from the market scene; two or three of the rest
will be their family, and one or two can also keep their Scene 1 roles.
Sort out the family relationships and ages—there should be two or
three generations represented. Keep children over the age of ten and
avoid exceptionally old people, who will be difficult to play seriously.
MANAGEMENT
Look at the photograph and Tuan’s painting again as you read the
commentary below. (Someone could read it aloud.)
‘The city is doomed and outside in the streets there is chaos, people
hurrying in all directions, some to get home and barricade their
houses, many to flee and escape anywhere, a lucky few to catch
the last foreign aircraft and ships.’
CONSTRAINT
A: you have been lucky and managed (using most of your family
savings) to arrange a passage on a fishing boat, which is leaving the
harbour in a few hours. Not everybody in the family will want to go, so
they have to be persuaded. Then, you all have to decide what to take. You
have been told to bring only two suitcases for the whole family (which
you must be able to carry—wheelie cases were almost unheard-of then).
What family items must be saved (each of you loves one family treasure
that you think must be kept)? Who will carry the suitcases? What other
things might you pack for survival on this dangerous sea journey to
somewhere unknown?
Start the scene with A announcing the lucky break with the boat. Very
shortly you will leave your home, probably for ever.
After ten minutes, you should have a list of the vital items you all
agreed upon. Cut the drama.

Scene 2B: A hitch

MANAGEMENT
Be ready to resume the scene almost immediately with the family
gathering with your suitcases ready to go. Now, all groups, look again at
the photograph.
CONSTRAINT
You have just learned that you cannot take suitcases after all, that you
can take onto the boat only what you can carry in your arms and your
pockets—no bags or cases!
A: resume the scene by announcing this, and get straight down to the
task of working out what can be jettisoned and what must be taken.
Teacher: when you think the group discussions are coming to an end,
cut the drama—it is time to leave the house—but everybody stay in-role.

Scene 2C: The farewell ceremony

MANAGEMENT
Immediately, everyone take a piece of paper and a pen and sit where you
can write. Think silently about what your character will most regret
leaving, about your life, your home, your city—maybe little details,
maybe people, maybe important ceremonies. You wonder if you will
return one day in the future.
Now write a letter. Address it ‘To me, if I ever return, or to whoever finds
it.’ Write down in no more than three or four sentences what you know
you will miss most about your life and home. The letter will be hidden
under the floorboards. Will you ever get to read it again?
When the letters have been written, still in-role, gather in your family
groups, standing in a circle, facing inward, each person holding your
letter. In chorus, say the words: ‘Farewell, Saigon our home. One day we
will return.’ It is essential that this step is taken seriously—no joking
around.
Now in turn, starting with A, each member of the family utters one
sentence about what they will miss most, starting with the words, ‘Most
of all, I will miss … ’ and finishing, ‘I wonder, will I ever return?’ As each
person finishes speaking, step forward into the circle and place your
letter on the ground, then step back for the next person, clockwise, to
speak. When everyone has finished, together in chorus say the line,
‘Farewell, Saigon our home. One day we will return.’
Cut the drama.

Scene 3: Escape for some

Now we are going to change the dramatic mode from role-play to theatre.
PRELIMINARIES
Turn once again to the painting Farewell to Saigon. Let your eyes rest on
its confusion as someone reads out these words:
‘One of the family nervously opens the door, and you all peer out as
the sound hits you. The city is a nightmare—bombs dropping,
crashing bricks, shrapnel whistling, screams. In the background the
rumble of tanks, an insistent recorded voice blaring, and military
music from the invading army. Sounds of gunfire. Crowds rushing
everywhere; dust in clouds; ambulances and stretchers trying to
get through; police waving and shouting frantically. Sound of
soldiers marching and military orders shouted (are they ours or
theirs—can you see?); some people with their belongings piled on
bicycles; old people hobbling and children dragged along, crying; a
few young men and women running with groceries, and televisions
looted from smashed shops; motorbikes and scooters everywhere,
and the little three-wheeled buses called ‘lambrettas’ weaving and
hooting madly … And right in the middle of all of it, teams of
newsreel cameras and journalists.
‘You take deep breaths and make a break for it, towards the
harbour … you try to hold hands but you can’t and the crowds
surge round you as if to swallow you up …’
SITUATION
Later that day, 30 April 1975.
 ROLES
The same market traders and their families.
MANAGEMENT
Return to your groups and join two groups together. Decide which group
(A) will stay in its family role. The other group (B) will change roles and
become other characters in the story of group A’s flight.
Together, you will recreate a television newsreel clip, showing one
brief but momentous episode in the family’s journey to the harbour and
onto the boat. It will last no more than twenty seconds, and will be played
out silently. One member of the assisting group B will give a journalist’s
voice-over commentary as the action is happening.
The newsreel clip will depict the moment when one or maybe two
members of the family get separated from the rest, and will not make it
onto the boat. How did this happen? In the crush? A wrong turn? An
obstructive official? An accident? A crime? Allot roles to the remaining
members of group B.
Let this brief clip be as dramatic as possible, then rehearse it for
presentation.
Bring the groups together to watch in turn each ‘newsreel’
presentation and listen to the accompanying commentary.
REFLECTION
As you watch, think about the scenes being depicted. Are they
believable? Realistic? Have the actors managed to conjure up a sense of
those awesome and dreadful moments?

The true story of Farewell to Saigon

Now we will explore in a similar way how drama gives you the
opportunity to show, dramatically and movingly, not just moments, but the
passage of time. This is done by depicting a series of single moments as a
serial narrative. For this, we will dramatise episodes in the real-life escape
story of the painter of Farewell to Saigon.
Scene 4: Tuan’s story
PRELIMINARIES
The ten numbered episodes overleaf tell the true story of L.K. Anh Tuan’s
escape. They need to be printed out on cards in advance, by the teacher
or a capable student.
SITUATION
Like the market traders, Tuan was intending to escape with his family,
but his son and wife were prevented from accompanying him. Only he
and his daughter got away.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD ONE

At the harbour Tuan and his daughter were smuggled onto a small boat
with ten others, forced to lie at the bottom with wooden decking placed
over them to hide them … some couldn’t breathe but Tuan found a piece
of tubing which he poked through a crack in the decking. The journey
took them down the river for several hours, to a larger boat. Two people
suffocated.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD TWO

They scrambled onto the larger boat; built for fifty, there were a hundred
and fifty aboard, with no room at first even to sit down. The boat weighed
anchor, and went out through the harbour almost to the open sea …
then the engine broke.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD THREE

Luckily, one of the refugees was a South Vietnam navy captain, who
believed he could mend the engine. After an hour he had done so.
Meanwhile, the crew and some of the refugees fled in a life-raft,
preferring to face the defeat back on land than go any further. This made
more room on board, and they set out confidently towards the open sea.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD FOUR

At the end of a day’s motoring, the engine broke again, and nothing
anybody was able to do could bring it to life again. They spent thirteen
days adrift in the boat, starving and nearly dying of thirst, taking it in
turns to climb overboard and soak in the ocean so their bodies might
absorb water—this was the suggestion of a doctor among them—
though the water was full of stinging jellyfish and the ever-present
danger of sharks.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD FIVE

After thirteen days, they were attacked and then saved by Thai pirates,
who took all their belongings but gave them water and food (rice and salt
fish). The pirates towed them closer to the coast, but this brought them
into Malaysian waters where the Thais could not venture, so they cut
Tuan’s boat adrift again, first strip-searching every passenger to make
sure they had no valuables left.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD SIX

Adrift and helpless again for two days, they were saved by Malaysian
fishermen, who refused to take them without payment of $1000.
Threats from the naval captain that he would personally search
everybody and throw overboard anyone who was hiding anything
produced the last valuable on board—a diamond hidden in a girl’s shoe.
The fishermen towed them to a lonely island, and again they were set
adrift, just outside the coral reef that encircled it.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD SEVEN

They swam or crawled over the razor-sharp coral, and fell bleeding onto
the sand where they all lay for hours as dead. When they awoke they
were still starving and did not know where to go. Some, including Tuan,
tried to eat nuts looking like little coconuts, but they were poisonous and
the doctor came to the rescue, making them drink copious amounts of
hot water, which saved them yet again.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD EIGHT

Nearly two days later, an armed patrol of Malaysian customs officers
found them, and they had to explain who they were, and plead to be
allowed to stay. Few could speak any Malay, and none of the officers
could speak Vietnamese.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD NINE

Their explanations were finally accepted, and Tuan spent the next six
months in a Malaysian refugee camp, desperately trying to use his
relatively good English (he had been a journalist and briefly a teacher in
Vietnam) to get sent somewhere that English was spoken.

TUAN’S STORY, CARD TEN

Finally Tuan was accepted into Australia, and made his home in
Brisbane, among the large Vietnamese refugee community which the
Australian government had accepted as its responsibility because of its
part in the war. He picked up all sorts of odd jobs. After three years he
stumbled into an art class for new migrants, and discovered that he had
a talent for painting. He learned fast, quickly learned to translate his
experiences onto canvas, and within a few years had become a well-
respected artist.
ROLES
Tuan and his daughter, the other people who escaped with him, and
some of the people whom they met during their adventure.
MANAGEMENT
Break the class into five groups.
We are going to create a serial narrative. Each group will compose two
frozen images, as in the game Postcards in Activity 1, but this time the
pictures will be serious and dramatic. Together with their spoken
commentaries, the ten images will tell in sequence the story of Tuan’s
real-life flight from Vietnam and what then happened to him.
Each group will take two of the following numbered episodes (in
sequence—1 and 2, 3 and 4, etc.). One member of the group, a good
reader with a clear voice, should be chosen to stay out of the images and
read the narrative for both episodes.
CONSTRAINT
We recommend that unless you are involved in the task of printing out
the cards, you do not read this story ahead, before doing the activity. The
whole story will work best if you are not aware, or at least not very aware,
of what is in the other episodes until you watch the story unfolding
through the sequence of stills. This will introduce the tension of
suspense for you. However, if you have read ahead, you will find that
going on to make it physical brings it vividly alive and it will still be
dramatic and moving.
You are going to tell Tuan’s story by presenting your frozen images in
the order they happened. All groups will need to be positioned where they
can see all the other groups, ready to move into immediate action when
their turn comes.
Each group in turn will freeze into their dramatic image, and the reader
will speak the words on the first card while the other groups observe
silently and listen closely. The group will immediately move into the
second image, and its commentary will be read. Then go straight on to
the next group. It will be most effective if the scenes can follow each
other straight away, without interruption, applause or pause for
discussion, like a single story in ten pictures.
REFLECTION
When this scene is over, return to Tuan’s painting once again. As a whole
class, discuss what you can see now, and how your understanding of the
painting has changed. The painting is not a neat linear sequence of
events like your serial narrative. It’s Tuan’s emotional journey—a swirling
mass of feelings expressed in paint. What emotions can you see and feel
now in the painting?

Scene 5: Aftermath
It was thirty years before Tuan was able to go back to Vietnam and revisit
his old home. Like our fictional characters, he had been separated in his
flight from his son, then a child. When he did return, one of his tasks was
to search for the boy. The child had survived and now had a wife and
family and a successful career of his own. The two of them eventually
met.
PRELIMINARIES
Now we are going back to experiential role-play to further explore our
narrative of the market people. Then a time jump into the future will
round off the drama.
SITUATION
2005, a family reunion in Vietnam.
ROLES
The market people who fled all those years ago when Saigon fell.
Get into pairs, A and B, with somebody you have not worked with
previously in this drama. This may need a little sorting out, even role-
swapping, as one person, A, will resume the character of a market family
member who succeeded in escaping during the flight to the harbour
(Scene 3). B will take a new role as A’s relative, the one who was left
behind in that mad dash.
MANAGEMENT
A: retrieve the letter you wrote and left under the floorboards. Find a
space, put two chairs opposite each other and stand beside them. Now
decide on your story: imagine that you did escape somewhere overseas
—surviving a hazardous journey like Tuan—and with great difficulty
managed to start a new life too. What has happened to you, where do you
live today, who is your family and what do you do? One thing is constant
for all As: B is that most loved relative they left behind in Vietnam.
B: decide the circumstances of your life in the last thirty years, how
you eventually made a success in the new Vietnam.
Be sure to take the time you need to develop these stories of your life.
CONSTRAINT
The meeting is not an easy one.
A: like Tuan, you have returned to Vietnam. You have found your old
home and the letter, and traced this relative you have so longed to see.
You are thrilled to meet your loved one, and want to find out all about
them and their life, family, work, interests, everything.
B: you do not know the hardships A has endured. Your memory is that
A abandoned you all those years ago; you imagine A has had an easy life
in a Western country. You are wary and wonder what this (almost)
stranger wants after all these years with no contact.
A: you may need to tell B of some of your adventures on the journey
(use Tuan’s or invent your own). At some point—but not too soon—read
your letter to B, to help prove how painful leaving was and how much you
did not want to go.
Start the scene very formally, shaking hands and then sitting down
facing each other.
OUTCOME
B does eventually respond to A’s persuasion, but not too quickly or
easily.
The scene will end in a reconciliation of sorts, each sharing some of the
story of your lives, then and now, and perhaps memories of the earlier
time, before A’s flight.
REFLECTION
Staying in-role, all pairs come together to form a circle, standing next to
your partner, with A on the right. Each character is now going to make a
wish. It may be happy or regretful.
A wish about the past.
A wish about the future.
Something you have just heard that you wish you had known earlier.
Something you wish you had not been told.
It will be in one sentence, and it will begin with either ‘I wish …’ or ‘If only
…’
Starting at any pair in the circle, and going round clockwise, each pair
in turn will express their wishes: A first, then B.
Do not stop between pairs to comment, laugh or clap. Just listen and
be ready to speak when your turn comes. You will find the overall scene
to be moving and probably surprising.
REFLECTIVE WRITING
In this final task, write two diary entries, in the first person (‘I … ’). The
first is in the role of the character you have just played. If you were A,
your entry is about meeting your long-lost family member, describing
your hopes for the meeting, and your changing emotions during the
encounter. B’s entry describes what was for you a strange and perhaps
unlooked-for meeting.
Then, without consulting your partner, change role to put yourself in
the other character’s shoes, and write their diary entry, in the first
person.
When you have finished, read the two entries to one another and
compare responses. You will probably be surprised how moving, and also
perhaps funny, these sound. Either response is fine.
Documenting and reflecting
We stressed the importance of documenting and reflecting on your drama
here. This process drama demonstrates how writing is a valuable
complement to drama: it can enrich our understanding, and even the
drama itself. The first piece of writing we asked you to do in this drama
(the letter) became an important feature of the dramatic final scene. Such
writing within the drama helps to strengthen and focus the emotions we
feel as the characters.
The diary entries we asked you to write at the end of the drama
presented different challenges and created a different kind of
understanding. The first diary entry was like the letter under the
floorboards—you were identifying with your character, focusing on your
emotions in the situation. The second may have been harder, demanding a
sudden change of viewpoint, distanced from the emotions of the character
you played. This challenged you to see the whole situation in a different
light. You will remember from your work on focus and framing in Chapter
3 how important both identification (being inside the event) and distancing
(being outside the event) are to dramatic understanding.
Now, knowing the full story, you could devise your own documenting
task or tasks, finding ways to chronicle and record the whole Refugee
Family story—two stories, really: the market people’s and Tuan’s—or
capture moments of one or the other.

Time in this drama

We set the final scene of the Refugee Family drama more or less in the
present to illustrate the main purpose of a drama set in a historical time or
faraway place. In this case, it was your grandparents’ time, before you
and possibly your parents were born. Historical settings can be much
further back than that. Drama can help us to understand how and why
people behave the way they do today; it can demonstrate how historical
processes still have power over us. This is one reason why people still find
the plays of the ancient Greeks and of Shakespeare moving and
meaningful.
Our Refugee Family drama can give us insights into other matters that
concern us in our time:
today’s wars and invasions
 the journeys refugees make now, and how different governments
respond to them
the decisions people make when they are under pressure to survive
whether or not to welcome refugees.

Playing with Time

There are many ways to ‘play’ with time to bring a drama to life—some of
these, such as time jumps, and creating sequences of key moments, we
met in the Refugee Family drama. As with place, there are some useful
aspects of time that we need to consider.

Closed and open time frames

For a certain kind of focus, some plays and dramas restrict themselves to
brief periods. A performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by
Edward Albee lasts over three hours; it is set in a single room and all the
action takes place on one night between 2 am and dawn. We say it has
unity of time. Many site-specific plays take place in real-time, like the Back
to Back Theatre classic Small Metal Objects, the story of a drug deal gone
wrong, played out in several real locations such as city shopping malls
and a railway station, among unsuspecting pedestrians. (This unusual
company and play are worth investigating online.) The Refugee Family
and Drugs in Sport dramas both used far wider time spans, crossing gaps
of months and years, jumping thirty years in Refugee Family, to show the
long-term effects of an event.

Messages and associations of period

Just as each place brings strong association and imposes constraints on
your drama, so does the time period. If you are free to decide when to set
your drama, you need to consider which period will be most apt for your
theme, and will enrich it most. A historical setting might provide valuable
distance, or the interest of the exotic.
Consider the associations of the period: a drama about law and order
(good laws and bad laws) might well be enriched by setting it in 1920s
Chicago, with its connections to gangsters and bootlegging. The story of a
rebellious teenager might be enhanced by being set in an age when all
children were expected to conform totally to their parents’ wishes and their
social class expectations. (Two hundred years ago a surprising number of
adventurous youngsters from well-off families, including many young
women, ran away from home and enlisted as ships’ cabin boys; in the
same period, many spirited young women were consigned by their
parents to lunatic asylums to make them conform.)

Constraints of period
When you have decided your period your dramatic action will be
constrained by two things:
The kinds and levels of technology which existed: Captain Cook
cannot text London to announce his discovery of Australia; London
must wait a year to get the news.
Social and economic conditions: in the Middle Ages, working people
were not allowed to travel without special permission, and had no
money to speak of anyway, so few people ever left their village, and
a traveller was a wonder.
Be prepared to do some research!

Tempo and Timing

There is another aspect of time in drama and theatre: the actual time we
spend doing an improvisation. When we improvise, the action takes place
in real time, in seconds, minutes, perhaps even hours—in school, the
length of a lesson. For this kind of time management we use the words
tempo and timing.

Tempo
The tempo of a drama relates to the kind of action going on, and to the
mood. A fight, for instance, will proceed at a faster tempo than a funeral.
A fast tempo demands sharp, energetic movements and speech, while a
slow tempo is characterised by deliberate, controlled movement and
speech.
The drama in this chapter used a range of tempos. In each case the
tempo was dictated by the purpose of the scene.

ACTIVITY 4
 With the Refugee Family drama in mind, consider the following questions
on tempo.
What tempo was established for the first scene, the market? What
about the second scene: the preparation for departure? Did it
change when character A announced that your belongings had to be
cut back to only what you could carry?
Discuss the tempo that was established in each of the other
improvised scenes. Which scene moved most quickly? Which most
slowly? Why?
Was there ever a change of tempo within a single scene, besides the
market scene?

Timing
While tempo refers to the management of time in a broad sense, timing
refers to the precise use of time, from one moment to the next. It is an
important factor in building dramatic tension—through long pauses or
hasty interruptions, for example.

ACTIVITY 5
Consider these aspects of timing in the Refugee Family drama.
List the longest moment of silence you experienced in each scene.
Think back to times in the improvisations when it was necessary for
you or others to speak quickly. Did this increase dramatic tension?
Do you recall moments when the timing needed to be handled
differently? Were there moments when people spoke too quickly?
Too slowly? Did not allow for silence? Held silences too long?
How was timing important in creating the powerful moments in the
drama?

AND IN PLAYS …
KING JOHN by William Shakespeare
Cause and effect follow swiftly on each other during this play: King
Richard the Lionheart has died. His caretaker during the Crusades, King
John, is now fighting the king of France for the throne of England. The
French king wants the boy Prince Arthur to rule. After several battles,
Arthur is captured by King John. John has a dilemma: the boy is a sweet,
innocent lad, but he will always be a threat, even in prison. John
impetuously speaks to the knight who has charge of the royal prisoner, Sir
Hubert.

EXTRACT FROM ACT 3, SCENE 3

JOHN: Hubert, thou art his keeper.

HUBERT:And I’ll keep him so

That he shall not offend your majesty.
JOHN: Death.
HUBERT: My lord?
JOHN: A grave.
HUBERT: He shall not live.
JOHN: Enough.
I could be merry now.

As You Prepare to Perform

This tiny extract reveals the moment of action that lies between cause and
effect, even though neither of the speakers directly says what he means.
Read between the lines.
What is the king ordering, or at least suggesting?
What cause has King John to make this suggestion?
What do you expect to be the effect of this conversation?
Good playwrights make their cause and effect clear, but they do not
always give the audience what they expect. Shakespeare gives us the
effect we are expecting—but not at all how we expected it! Hubert duly
begins arrangements to have the prince first blinded, then killed. However,
in a long scene of almost unbearable tension, he allows himself to talk to
his victim, and then can no longer go through with the dreadful deed.
Arthur remains unscathed, though still a prisoner. Thank goodness,
because King John, too, has a change of heart. Now he wants the boy
alive and free. But Shakespeare has not finished with us yet. Hubert is told
to free the young prisoner. But Arthur does not know that, and believes his
life is still in danger. Desperate to gain his freedom, he leaps from the
castle walls, and kills himself only moments before Hubert comes to release
him. But, returning to our moment of action, all this lies in the future. Look
again at the passage.
Why might King John and Hubert say so little?
The royal war tent where this scene is set is full of people. They are all
talking about the battle, and what the victory means. How might this
affect the way Hubert and the king have their conversation?
Until this moment, King John has not been a real villain. Certainly his
lords do not think he is one. How might his need to retain his
reputation with Hubert as well as the courtiers affect the timing of his
suggestion?
Would they be speaking quickly, slowly or a mix of both? Are there
any key pauses?
Are they being furtive, using furniture, or hands, to screen their
conversation from the others? Or perhaps showing others, somehow,
they do not want to be interrupted?
Where are they in physical relation to one another? Standing? Is one
of them sitting?

TRY OUT THE SCENE

In pairs, play the scene. You should try it a few times, pausing at different
points to see how that affects the power of the moment.
chapter 6
narrative
So far we have considered five key elements of drama: the Human
Context, Tension, Focus, Place and Space, and Time. We have built our
understanding of each element using workshop activities and playtexts
which depict an event in the lives of particular characters trying to resolve
a dramatic tension at a particular time and in a particular place. In two
process dramas, the Drugs in Sport drama (Chapter 3) and the Refugee
Family drama (Chapter 5), events are linked together, each connected with
the next, so that a story builds as you play the sequence of episodes. This
chapter expands on how powerful stories are built into dramatic action: it
draws on our sixth element—narrative.
If you review the episodes of the Drugs in Sport drama you will see they
show not only how a drama can be focused through framing but how that
series of events built dramatic action as it moved from a start point
(winning the 2005 Tour de France) to an end point ( Armstrong confessing
on national television in 2013). Narrative is created by this movement
through time, which tells us what happens from one episode of the story to
the next. Narrative is a feature of many human activities—fiction writing
and storytelling most obviously—whether the story events are written about
or spoken aloud. In drama and theatre the story events are acted out,
performed and shared with others. For most kinds of drama each story
event or episode will establish all of the Ws: What’s happening, Who to,
Where, When and What’s at stake. A strong narrative deepens dramatic
tension as players and audiences seek answers to a sixth W: ‘What
happens next?’
So, the events, or episodes, connect in sequence and often in
chronological order, showing the linear flow of events according to time—
although we are all familiar with the use of flashbacks and jumps forward
that disrupt the orderly flow of events.

ACTIVITY 1 TIMELINE
Review the Refugee Family drama presented in the last chapter.
Continuing the story of the market people (not Tuan’s story), create a
thirty-year timeline from 1975 to 2005 and mark the events you were
asked to play out in the activities. Using your framing skills (see here)
design two additional story episodes and place them on the timeline.
These events should make it harder for the market people to escape from
Vietnam and for them to return thirty years later.

Plot: cause and effect

There is one more key term which helps us to understand narrative and
that is plot. While narrative builds through a sequence of events, plot
attends to the Whys—the more complex relationships that show why each
episode links to the next. Plot allows us to fully understand the connections
between events, why one event leads to the next. The most common way
of connecting moments of action is using cause and effect. Put simply,
Lance Armstrong’s years of doping and dishonest denials cause him finally
to tell the truth in a grand and public way and thus he is forced to deal
with the effects of his years of deception and betrayal. Whether you are
creating process dramas or playtexts, attending to this kind of chain of
causation between story episodes makes your narrative complex and
layered, so that it shines a light on how people feel and act in particular
circumstances.
Playwrights have long understood the importance of narrative and plot
in dramatic action. Aristotle, illustrious Greek philosopher and scholar of
drama, said more than two thousand years ago that of all the elements of
drama, ‘the most important is the plot, the ordering of the incidents’. In his
Poetics, the earliest surviving book on dramatic theory, he proposes that a
plot must have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end, and the events of the
plot must causally relate to one another as being either necessary or
probable’. We will examine this plot structure by applying it to a popular
children’s story.

ACTIVITY 2 RED RIDING HOOD

SITUATION AND ROLES
Is this text familiar?
‘What big arms you have, grandmother!’
‘The better to hug you with, my child.’
‘What big legs you have, grandmother!’
‘The better to run with, my child.’
‘What big ears you have, grandmother!’
‘The better to hear you with, my child.’
‘What big eyes you have, grandmother!’
‘The better to see you with, my child.’
‘What big teeth you have, grandmother!’
‘The better to eat you.’
And upon saying these words, the wicked wolf threw himself upon
Red Riding Hood and ate her up.
Red Riding Hood is a well-known European fairy story many of you will
recognise. It is about a hunter (the wicked wolf) and his victim (the
young Red Riding Hood).
MANAGEMENT
Recall the details of the story and share them in groups of four or five. If
the story is unfamiliar you can quickly find it online. Select one of your
group to play Red Riding Hood and another to play the wolf. Now, as a
group, create a frozen image of the two characters at one particularly
 dramatic moment from the above text. Each group share your freeze
frame with the rest of the class.
In the traditional fairy-tale the scene above occurs towards the end,
although it is not the last scene; there is at least one more involving
woodcutters—do you remember? Map out and present five more frozen
images to show the beginning, middle and end of this story. Use all
members of your group to create the six frozen images which present a
clear progression of the plot from beginning to end. Share the sequence
of images with the other groups and discuss why you chose those
particular moments of the plot.
Now take the plot structure of Red Riding Hood as you have shown it in
your six frozen images and apply it to another story of a hunter and
victim. How might you update and adapt the plot of Red Riding Hood to a
new hunter and victim of your own making and interest? Perhaps it is set
in a galaxy far, far away; perhaps it features a zombie; or perhaps it
shows cruel bosses who finally get what they deserve. Once you have
created your new six frozen images, present them to the other groups
and discuss how effectively the plot has evolved from the traditional
story to the new one.

Arc of Narrative
Of course, the power of a narrative doesn’t depend merely on the way
events progress in a meaningful sequence from beginning to end. As we
saw in Chapter 2, tension is a vital component of dramatic power. For the
drama to be engaging, it is important that the sequence of events works
over the course of the piece first to build and then to release tension. This
arc of narrative can be seen as rising from the beginning to a peak or
crisis at the middle and then falling to the end of the story. Some action,
problem or event introduces the drama and propels it forward as rising
action. Eventually the tension will rise to a crisis confronting all major
characters. They cannot escape the consequences of the decisions they are
required to make and from this point the falling action leads to the
resolution of the play.
This arc of narrative is very common in plays and films. In it, life is
shown in naturalistic events, that large numbers of people might identify
with as they struggle to get on with their own lives. In this narrative
structure, the moment of crisis is most often the moment of greatest tension,
which may be loud and extreme (a gunshot) or quiet and intense (a
mother’s silent farewell to her young children as she is taken away). After
the crisis, often culminating in the climax, the tension is released and the
narrative is resolved, rounded off in a way which is satisfying for all.
To see this model of narrative action at work we can apply it to our
Refugee Family drama. It is possible to map the events of that drama in the
following graph.

This arc of the Refugee Family narrative sets out the episodes to show the
dramatic tension rising, peaking and then falling away to a resolution. The
episodes are sequenced chronologically, according to the order in which
they happened. It can be seen that incidents in one story event invariably
cause things to happen in later events.
1. Pretext: Farewell Saigon (Painting of events, April 1975)
2. Our home under threat (February 1975; six weeks before the fall of
Saigon.)
3. Planning the escape (30 April 1975)
4. Escape for some: newsreel clips (Later in the day, 30 April 1975)
5. Tuan’s story (April 1975 to 1979)
6. Aftermath (2005)
There are two disruptions to this logical order of events. The Farewell
Saigon introduction begins with a painting which represents not one single
moment but multiple events and feelings associated with the turmoil of that
time. The photograph then anchors these to a specific time (30 April
1975) and place (Saigon). In this way the narrative begins broadly, with
the multiple messages of the painting then converging into a particular
time and place which sets the actions for subsequent scenes.
The second disruption comes at the fifth event, Tuan’s story. While this
episode continues the narrative by investigating what may happen once a
refugee has made good his or her escape, it does so by shifting the focus
of the drama to consider the real life story of L.K. Anh Tuan. By acting out
Tuan’s story we are of course continuing the refugee drama, but have
shifted the frame of the action outside the event.

Beginnings and Endings

The first moments of any play or process drama are extremely important
and often dictate the success of the entire drama. A gripping process
drama will typically start with a highly engaging pre-text.

Pre-text
The pre-text frequently involves one or two activities that take participants
into the world of the drama by opening it up with clarity and economy. In
our Refugee Family drama the pre-text was Tuan’s painting, with its
multiple images provoking a host of questions, including ‘What is it
about?’ Discovering it is called Farewell Saigon begins to answer this
question, but what and where is Saigon and what kind of farewell is this?
Tuan has painted his emotions into this piece as well, and when the poetry
of the painting is juxtaposed with the desperate scramble of people in the
photograph taken on 30 April 1975, we know we are dealing with
people fleeing for their lives and their future. So this pre-text has not just
introduced participants to the facts of the situation but opened them to the
emotions and feelings likely to arise in the drama.

A fitting end
Have you ever felt cheated at the end of a story? A story must come to an
end with some kind of climax that is logically consistent with the beginning
and satisfying for participants and audience. Some dramas are contrived
to conjure up an unbelievably happy ending, an almost magical resolution
to the tensions of the drama. Sometimes the ending is signalled very early
and that too can be frustrating. Or perhaps we’ve seen the same ending
over and over. Yes, despite all obstacles the boy always gets the girl, or
the girl gets her boy, and the ending is predictable and uninteresting.
Creating a fresh and distinctive ending to a drama, resolving it in a way
which completes the drama, is always a challenge. Aristotle believed that
an ending should round off and unify all that has happened in the drama.
He wanted to create a whole through ‘the structural union of the parts’ so
that the work wasn’t ‘disjointed or disturbed’.

Thinking like a Story Analyst

Producers of plays, novels, games and films have learned that success
largely depends upon the power and freshness of their story. Many film
and gaming companies now employ story analysts who scrutinise
narratives looking for recurring patterns. One such pattern is the hero myth
or hero story, which in its short version goes as follows. As you will see,
the hero is traditionally male. Some of you may have opinions on this!
We meet the hero in his ordinary life and world, which is turned
upside down when he is offered the opportunity to undertake a
dangerous adventure. Reluctant at first, he finally accepts the
challenge, convinced by a wise old man or woman. So he embarks
on his way and faces his first trial. As he struggles to succeed he is
supported by helpers and allies. Eventually he reaches the most
dangerous place of all where he (and his helpers) face the ultimate
ordeal. He overcomes all, gaining the treasure or defeating the evil,
before taking the path back to his everyday life. In the course of this
journey the hero is transformed and brings his newly won prizes,
experience and wisdom to enrich the lives of those around him.

ACTIVITY 3 THINKING LIKE A STORY ANALYST

Take time to read the description of the hero myth above, carefully
noting each step in the sequence. Now see how well this sequence
 applies to a film you know well and admire. If you are struggling to settle
on one, try A New Hope, the first Star Wars film from 1977. The more
familiar you are with this arc of narrative, the more you will recognise it in
nearly all entertainment media that has drama at its heart—plays, films,
TV series, novels and virtual reality games.

Fragmenting Narrative Structure

Not all narratives follow the sequenced path of chronology. We are all
familiar with how film makers chop up and disrupt the chronological flow
of their narrative with flashbacks and jumps into the future, even splitting
the screen to show two events happening simultaneously and from different
points of view. Such interruptions are not uncommon in modern plays and
process dramas and you can have a rich and creative time experimenting
with these possibilities. You can experiment too with other ways of
structuring your narrative.
Rather than sequencing a chain of events driven by cause and effect,
you may choose to play out scenes based on the four seasons: summer,
autumn, winter, spring. These scenes may be unrelated in terms of plot, but
together they create a satisfying sense of the circle of life. Another way of
structuring narrative is to take one particular place and show what
happens there time after time. All the action could be set in one hotel
room, for instance, each scene involving different hotel guests, each with
their own story. This episodic structure is unified by the place, which,
unlike the different stories that move in and out of it, does not alter from
one scene to the next.
Contemporary storytelling is highly inventive and often deliberately
breaks the ‘rules’ of narrative. In creating process dramas, we can control
their direction and we can be extremely flexible in the ways that we build
them, twisting and morphing to suit everyone’s curiosity.
This chapter has set out the fundamentals of the linear and well-made
narrative. We will explore further ways traditional narrative is broken
apart in contemporary drama in Chapter 12, but first let’s perform the
narrative structure set out in a short play text written more than four
hundred years ago.
AND IN PLAYS …
AS YOU LIKE IT by William Shakespeare
EXTRACT FROM ACT 2, SCENE 7
One of Shakespeare’s most famous passages from As You Like It, by a
character called Jaques, is known as the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ monologue.
It identifies seven phases of a human life from infant to death and
Shakespeare uses these seven ages as a narrative to tell the story of
human life. The speech is set out below, with a line break after each of
life’s phases.

One man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.

And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.
 The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As You Prepare to Perform

Read the passage aloud, the whole class in chorus, led by the teacher,
then break into seven groups and allocate an ‘age’ to each group.
Read through your part and discuss what Shakespeare is saying about
your ‘age’. You may need some help with the more obscure words.
Access one of the many online versions of this monologue. We strongly
recommend the version by Bille Brown, an Australian actor, whose
delivery is very clear and slow. Listen to his rendition two or three times,
paying particular attention to the age you are performing. Time this section
of Brown’s speech—it is exactly the time you will have to work with in the
next step.

PERFORMANCE 1
In your groups, devise a set of movements, in mime, to illustrate what
Jaques is saying about your age in his speech. Rehearse your brief
moment of action, marking it clearly with freezes at the beginning and
end.
Now perform your segment against the recorded sound track. All seven
groups need to be arranged in the performance space so that the action
passes smoothly from one age to the next. This performance should
synchronise with the recording.
PERFORMANCE 2
This time, you will perform the text as well as the action—and put it into a
contemporary setting. After all, if those were the seven ages of mankind
then presumably they still are!
Don’t try to literally represent everyone mentioned by Jaques. For
example, don’t young adults, men and women—not just soldiers—go
through a period when they are full of ‘strange oaths’, jealously protect
their reputation, ‘sudden and quick to quarrel’ and willing to defend
themselves no matter the cost? What might those people be doing today
that you can illustrate equally vividly? Decide a new set of actions that
typify your age in its contemporary setting.
If you feel you have to change some of Shakespeare’s words to make
modern sense of it, do so extremely carefully, and only when absolutely
necessary. Take care to keep the rhythm of Shakespeare’s verse intact.
Select one of your group to speak the words of your age. The teacher,
or a student stepping out of the group-work, can speak the introductory
lines.
Rehearse and polish your performance, making sure you suit the actions
to the words exactly.
Play the two versions. You now have two distinct performances of the
same narrative in different settings. If you can, perform these to an external
audience, perhaps another drama class. Based on the audience response,
which telling worked most powerfully?
chapter 7
language
In drama, as in real life, we express our ideas, our feelings and our needs
to each other by:
the words we say
the way we say them
our body language.
Together these make up the language of the drama. In this chapter we will
launch straight into a set of activities in order to explore in action how we
may control this element of drama.

ACTIVITY 1
PRELIMINARIES
Make groups of five—three to improvise and two to monitor—and try the
following scene.
ROLES
Two parents and their child.
SITUATION
All have agreed to meet in town to go to a special show; Parent A, who has
the tickets, arrives very late, so that the family misses the first half.
CONSTRAINT
It is an ordinary, caring family, and the parents do not want the child to
be affected by their argument.
MANAGEMENT
Conduct the role-play as naturally as possible.
Monitor 1: Take notes on the language—the kinds of words used:
Is there any swearing?
Are words used that the child would not understand?
Is it ordinary, domestic language, or is it heightened in any way?
Do all three characters use the same language?
Monitor 2: Take notes on the way the characters talk, how they use their
voices, their use of body language:
Is the volume shrill or soft, murmuring?
Is there variety of pitch?
Do they use gestures and signals? How do they stand or sit? What
are their eyes and faces doing?
At the end, monitors share with the improvisers what you have observed.

ACTIVITY 2
In the same groups, now try this scene.
ROLES
Two generals, both high ranking military officers, and a child king or
queen. The player who was parent A now plays General A; the child in
Activity 1 is now the child monarch.
SITUATION
A country with a tradition of rule by monarch has been taken over by its
army. The generals have retained the child monarch who is still revered
 by the people. After one year in power, a great anniversary ceremony and
military parade has been prepared, to honour and celebrate the new
government.
General A, who was to make a speech to the troops, has arrived late
and ruined the celebration, annoying the crowds by seeming arrogant
and dismissive.
CONSTRAINTS
General A is sincere; both generals are respected: they are not ruthless
and are trying to work with the young monarch to make a better
government. They do not want their young monarch to know what
damage may have been caused by A’s late arrival.
MANAGEMENT
Monitors again, observe carefully and take notes on the kinds of
language used and the way the characters talk, as you did in the last
scene. Share your findings with the players.

ACTIVITY 3
Comparing scenes you will have noticed a lot of difference in the
language, voice and body language of all six characters. Look carefully at
the monitors’ notes of one of the scenes and take note of the particular
words, intonations and gestures they picked out. Now try playing the
other scene, using that kind of language. Comic? Silly? Or just frustrating
and unbelievable? Of course, because the language is now wrong!

The Language of Drama

Dramatic language is shaped by three factors: the situation, the roles and
the relationships. For the drama to work, the language must convey these
convincingly and appropriately.

The Situation
You wouldn’t expect military governors to talk about cinema tickets, nor
modern parents to address their children with: ‘Your majesty’. Even within
a particular time or place there are different languages, or registers, for
different occasions. This is as true in real life as it is in drama. All of you
have the register you use with your friends, the one you use in a school
assembly for thanking a visitor, the one you use with your grandparents,
the one you use for worship, the one you use in showing a rival gang how
tough you are. Each register has its own vocabulary and speaking
characteristics, which in other situations might be inappropriate, even
taboo. At the very least, they would sound odd.

The Roles
The register depends not only on the situation, but also on your role and
purpose in the action. You may have noticed in the first improvisation that
the parents’ registers were similar, but the child’s was a bit different. We
can explore this a little further.

ACTIVITY 4
Try playing out the scene from Activity 1 again. The situation will remain
the same, but we will change the roles slightly.
A and B: instead of being parents, you are teachers and nuns,
members of a holy order, taking a group of children from outback
Australia to a special show in the city. C is one of those children.
Monitors: take notes on how this scene differs from Activity 1 in its
verbal and non-verbal language. You will probably also find similarities. At
the end, share your findings with the players.

The Relationships
The language of drama is further modified by what the characters feel for
each other, and by their relative status.

ACTIVITY 5
 Consider character C in the previous improvisations: as a child, he or she
is lower in status than the adults, but as a child-monarch, higher. Now
consider A and B. As parents or nuns, how would their feelings towards
each other affect their language? Try out these two variations of the
same improvisation:
A and B loving or deeply respecting each other
A and B disliking each other.
You are likely to find some striking differences in their language, both in
the kind of words they use, and particularly in their body language.

Language and Imagery

You’ll have already noticed that language is not just spoken words. The
way the voice is used, and how non-verbal gestures and signals are
selected and shaped, are all important skills to develop when devising
dramas. Now let’s see how words and body language combine to create
dramatic imagery.

ACTIVITY 6
Divide into groups of four.
STEP 1
Each group is to prepare a dialogue for a new dramatic context in which
each member of the group speaks three ‘blocks’ of language, with each
block being about two or three sentences. You decide the topic, which
may be generated from the first block of language, for instance:
‘Hello, Tom. Have you managed to fix the brakes yet? I’ve got to pick
up Mum at five thirty.’
‘Who let you into my dressing room? Please leave immediately
before I call security.’
Notice how in these examples, the situation, roles and relationships are
indicated clearly.
 You can speak in any order you like, each developing the situation as it
grows. Just be sure that you only use three blocks of language each; no
more, no less.
When all groups have prepared their work and feel comfortable with it,
present it to the other members of the class.
STEP 2
Now rework your dialogues, replacing each block of language with three
words only. This means that each participant speaks a total of only nine
words (three groups of three words).
You must keep the original meaning of your first dialogue, so give
careful thought to the ways you can express meaning through body
language as well, and the way you speak.
Present this second version to your classmates. Did you feel it worked
more effectively or less? Which blocks were improved? Which suffered?
Did any of the body language stand out?
STEP 3
Rework this dialogue one last time, replacing each group of three words
with one word only. Each participant now speaks three words in total.
Each word will now do the job of a whole block of language. You will have
to work even harder now to devise ways of conveying your original
meaning. Present this third version to the class. Did you feel it worked
effectively? What was improved? What was made unclear?

Economy
In dialogue less is often more. No doubt, there were several occasions
during the last activity when you felt that fewer words worked better than
the long block of language. This economy of language proved successful
because it was strengthened by non-verbal images. Language works best
in this naturalistic role-play when it is used with economy. It is easy for
participants to ‘over talk’ in improvisation, using vague statements and
repetitions which don’t advance or clarify the action. You should never talk
for the sake of ‘doing something’; what you say should always add to, or
be in agreement with, the context, your role, and the way the action is
developing.

Non-verbal imager y
Dramatic action is made up of language and movement. Our movements
create visual images which help convey meaning. When the language
available to you was restricted, you had to rely far more on visual images
—non-verbal language—to make your meaning clear. Dramatic action is
enriched when physical images reinforce and strengthen the language.
Consider occasions when this happened in the scenes you just developed.
Images and language can also be managed in such a way that they
contradict each other. Imagine, for instance, the tired mother sitting with
her feet up, sipping a coffee and saying, ‘Oh, I’m a ball of energy. I’ve
done nothing all day’. Here the physical image is sending a very different
message, or subtext, from the verbal language. Did any such
contradictions arise in the activities in this chapter?
In the next activity, you will see the power of economical language, and
how language and image can contradict each other to great effect.

ACTIVITY 7
Here is yet another variant of the dramatic problem of persons who turn
up late, letting down their partners and others who depend on them. The
scene, which we have updated to a modern context, is from
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
SITUATION
Mark Antony and Octavius, the joint military dictators of Rome, are
threatened by a rebel uprising. Mark Antony, the senior, more popular
and respected of the two, goes to America to get military aid. There, he is
completely sidetracked, and spends his time in Hollywood, besotted by
the film star Cleopatra. Magazine photos of them in Californian night-
clubs get back to Rome. Can you imagine how Octavius feels?
Mark Antony returns, without the military aid, desperate to save face
somehow. How does he feel, stepping off the plane, knowing he has let
Octavius down?
This scene is set in the airport lounge where Octavius presides over
the official welcome for Mark Antony. There are two seats ready for a
television interview.
ROLES
Mark Antony, Octavius, several reporters and government officials.
CONSTRAINTS
Mark Antony and Octavius will have plenty to say to each other, but the
TV cameras and their colleagues are all around, listening hard, so they
must maintain a united front.
MANAGEMENT
In pairs, try the scene first with your own words. Start with Mark Antony
at least five metres away, walking towards the welcoming party.
Now, here are Shakespeare’s words, from Act 2, Scene 2, which we
have deliberately left unpunctuated:

OCTAVIUS: Welcome to Rome

MARK ANTONY: Thank you
OCTAVIUS: Sit
MARK ANTONY: Sit sir
OCTAVIUS: Nay then
[Which can mean either ‘all right’ or ‘no’!]

Learn the words (it shouldn’t be too hard!). As you do, you will notice that
it is possible to say the words in quite different ways with different
results. It is a puzzling piece, and raises several questions.
Why does Mark Antony, the senior partner, use the word ‘Sir’?
Should there be a full stop after it, or a question mark, or three dots
…?
Are there any long pauses? Where?
Who sits down—Mark Antony or Octavius, both or neither?
 After you have tried out the scene a couple of times, form groups of
seven or eight. This scene is very public, with friends of each speaker,
reporters and others. Will the extra characters have an effect on the
power game? Try the scene again, starting with that five metre walk.
The text from Antony and Cleopatra is very ambiguous. You will
probably find that different groups in the class end up with different
seating arrangements, according to whether Octavius or Mark Antony
gets the upper hand, or a stalemate results. There are no right answers in
the words themselves. You would need to read the whole play to decide
finally. However, it is wonderfully rich in possibilities. Do you notice also
how economical it is? Five pieces of conversation, which express a
complex relationship and a tense moment, all in ten words, within a
single line of Shakespeare’ s verse.

AND IN PLAYS …
NAMATJIRA by Scott Rankin and the Namatjira
family
EXTRACT FROM SCENE 11: THE SYDNEY TRIP
TREVOR: … now Albert the jetsetter, Albert the popstar. Sydney Airport,
mobbed by the curious, the paparazzi, well wishers. Women faint.
Intoxicated. Cameras follow his every move. Martin Place, press the
flesh, crowds flock. Harbour cruise, sightseeing—Taronga Park Zoo.
The Sydney ‘ art-er-rati’ fawn, parading him. Society women touch
him. So handsome, and exotic in red shirt ’n’ cowboy hat.
SOCIALITE: Ahh, I shook Albert Namatjira’s hand. Arahhh!

TREVOR: Invited out, black tie, Journalist Club. Had everything … except
shoes. Take him by the hand … shopping for shoes. Wash his hard
old gnarled feet. Nobody said anything, but he knew … poor old
fella.
ALBERT washes his feet as the voice of a NEWSREEL is heard.
NEWSREEL: [voice-over] Albert Namatjira, the famous Aboriginal artist from
Central Australia, caused a stir today at Sydney’s famous zoo. Note
the reactions of the animals to the proximity of a full blooded native.
Lions, tigers and particularly the apes sniff the air as they realise a
descendant of the primeval jungle is among them. They jump up and
down, hurling themselves against the bars of the cage, pick up
handfuls of debris from the floor and throw it at their primitive cousin.
Mahogany man takes it all in his stride as he smiles for the camera.
wipes his feet. A shoe box is handed to him by a
ALBERT
Namatjira family member wearing a suit jacket. ALBERT tries on
the shoes.
TREVOR: How dignified he is, how quiet, how clever … To draw just like us
… So famous now … William Dargie paints him for the Archibald.
As the music of ‘God Save the Queen’ plays, QUEEN ELIZABETH II
enters through the audience.
Breathtaken, our young Queen awards Albert the Coronation
medal … How deeply he bows to this little girl from London.
QUEEN: Mr Namatjira? Or should I call you Albert? Named after my father,
is that right?
ALBERT: I’m not so sure ma’m.

QUEEN: Prince Albert, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George of Windsor.

Or plain old George, which was rather fun, became king. That rather
spoilt things. Became ‘ King George the Sixth, by the Grace of God,
of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas,
King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India’, which is rather a
mouthful. Anyway, moving on, moving on …
ALBERT: Your Majesty …

DERIK is reluctant to leave, enjoying his role as the QUEEN.

TREVOR: Thank you, Derik. Derik …

Derik: What?! It’s not all about you, Trevor. You can have the stage and you
know what, you can kiss my black ass.
The QUEEN exits.
TREVOR: Anyway, moving on, moving on … Albert is invited to see the State
 Theatre, variety show, there’s a murmur of excitement as he enters.
And then, as one, the audience stand, and on their feet eyes turned
towards him … a two-minute ovation. Why this ovation? What was it
we were all yearning for in the cities? What was it about ourselves,
that we saw as we stared through our little Namatjira windows, our
cheap prints, over the mantelpiece, in our rows of fibro fifties homes
in brand new Kirrawee?
And so the paparazzi snap. Big news. Sydney Morning Herald: ‘A
black man we can be proud of’. And when the news gets out that
young Elizabeth loves her Namatjira painting, everyone wants one.
Prices go through the roof—two hundred guineas! So famous now,
our biggest companies want a piece of him, sponsor him, help him.
Ampol gives him a shiny new truck … with his name on the side:
‘ALBERT NAMATJIRA—ARTIST’.
REPORTER: So what do you think of your shiny new truck, Albert?

ALBERT: I like my truck.

REPORTER: Will it help with your work?

ALBERT: It will help, yes.

REPORTER: Albert, over here. Do you have your driver’s license yet?
ALBERT: License? Who’s this ‘license’?

As You Prepare to Perform

First, undertake some preliminary research into the life of the Australian
painter Albert Namatjira—who was he, when and where did he live, how
did he become so significant that Scott Rankin and the Namatjira family
wrote a play about him?
In groups of five read through the scene at least twice. After each read-
through make a list of terms which are unfamiliar to you and find out what
everything mentioned in the scene means. You will probably need to
investigate Martin Place, ‘ art-er-rati’, William Dargie, King George VI,
Kirrawee and Ampol at least.
THINK ABOUT
At least five quite different registers are being used here.

Trevor
Trevor, the narrator, is speaking in a type of shorthand. His sentences are
short and sharp as he describes the incidents and events of the visit of
Albert, the newly discovered young artist, to Sydney in 1953. In the
original production of Namatjira Trevor is actually the name of Trevor
Jamieson, the Aboriginal actor who took this role.
How does Trevor’s language convey a vivid picture of what is
happening to Albert and how Albert is feeling?
What is Trevor’s attitude towards the way Albert is being treated?

The Newsreel Voice-over

How is Albert portrayed in the text of this newsreel?
Which phrases present Albert as a kind of exotic creature rather than
a fellow human being?
Is it likely that the same register of language used in the newsreel
would be used today? Why or why not? How might the language
change?

Queen Elizabeth
What in the language suggests that the young queen is nervous?
What creates the humour in the queen’s use of language?

Albert
Albert says very little in this extract, speaking only in response to questions
from Queen Elizabeth and the reporters.
What do his replies reveal about how he feels about all the attention
he is receiving?
What might Albert be doing with his shoes, to help communicate non-
verbally the way he feels during this scene?

Derik
In this extract Derik provides a source of humour through dramatic irony.
The playwright has deliberately used Derik’s words and actions to
exaggerate and make fun of the fact that the Aboriginal actor playing
Derik (actually called Derik in real life) is impersonating Queen Elizabeth
II. Humour is created when the audience recognises the difference
between what Derik’s saying and what is actually happening. The irony of
Derik performing the opposite of who he is (not the white female sovereign
of the British Empire but a black male actor) is extremely funny. Discuss the
effect of the character Queen Elizabeth II being played by a male black
actor and these other elements of stagecraft:
Entering ‘through the audience’
Talking endlessly about her father’s titles
Refusing to leave the stage
Dropping character and speaking directly as Derik (the actor) to
Trevor (the narrator) and ending with ‘… you can kiss my black ass’.

TRY OUT THE SCENE

All these registers clash, and that is part of the comedy. As you act it out, if
possible with a bad microphone and speaker for the newsreel, play up the
dramatic irony to make the most of these clashes. Make sure the physical
action and images back up the language; have fun with the shoes, with
Derik not wanting to stop playing Queen Elizabeth II and with Albert’s
bemused responses to his sudden celebrity in the white man’s world.

Voice
The words we speak and the images that accompany them create
meaning, both for ourselves as participants in improvisations and for
audiences watching a play or film. However, there is a third factor which
helps create dramatic meaning: the way the words are said. The delivery
of language tells a great deal about the speaker’s intentions and opinions.
Often the way something is spoken says more than the words themselves.

ACTIVITY 8
In pairs, improvise a short scene.
 ROLES
A parent and a seventeen-year-old daughter or son.
SITUATION
The parent is reading the paper. The teenager wants to borrow the family
car (you decide why).
CONSTRAINTS
1. The parent may only respond with the word ‘No’, no matter how
often the request for the car is played. You won’t be needing the car,
and you are not certain about refusing, but you can only ever reply
with ‘No’—except maybe one final ‘Yes’, if your child manages to
convince you. It’s up to you.
2. In the same pairs, play the scene again. This time, the parent won’t
let the seventeen year old have the car—it’s not going to happen
(you decide why). The parent must answer ‘No’ to every request,
including the final one.

It’s how you say it

Was that second scene hard to play out? The teenager would have
realised very swiftly that the whole thing was a waste of time. In the first
scene, the parent’s uncertainty should have registered and it would have
always seemed possible that they might give in. Did they, in the end?
On each occasion, although the parent could only say ‘No’, quite
different meanings were being created, perhaps leading to quite different
outcomes. The way the parent said ‘No’ was what mattered.

ACTIVITY 9
SITUATION
At the breakfast table.
ROLES
Make pairs, A and B. The relationship will emerge in the improvisation.
 MANAGEMENT
A and A begin in a friendly way, then one says something to anger the
other. A row develops, and becomes quite heated. Finally, one
apologises, the argument ends, and they are friends again.
CONSTRAINT
In this improvisation you cannot speak in English. Instead you must talk
in a made-up foreign language. Of course, it will just be garbled sound,
but you will know exactly what is going on through the rhythms and
patterns of human speech.

Attributes of voice
In Activity 9 you were not using language, just your voice and strange
sounds to create your meaning. Even though you can’t understand one
another’s words, the pattern of argument, apology and friendship is quite
clear. Even subtle variations in voice can convey quite different meanings.
There are several ways in which voice and speech are handled in
drama. Being able to understand and describe these ways will help
increase your flexibility and control over voice, whether you are following
text or improvising.
1. Sound and silence: listen for the silences that occur. When are the
pauses longest? Shortest?
2. Pitch: listen for variation in the height or depth of the sound. As an
argument builds do the voices become higher?
3. Pace: listen for variation in the speed of delivery. When is the sound
coming thick and fast? Slow and deliberate?
4. Intonation: listen for changes in the rise or fall of the sound at the end
of sentences. What happens when questions are asked? Demands are
made?
5. Volume: listen for changes in loudness or softness. When is the voice
louder? Softer?
6. Tone colour: pay attention to the quality of the voice. Is it warm and
understanding? Cold and abrupt? Aggressive and hot?
7. Emphasis: listen for the sounds which are stressed. How are certain
sounds emphasised? When do stresses increase?
ACTIVITY 10
Select one or two pairs to act out the improvisation they devised in
Activity 9. As they do so, note the variations in voice as listed above.
Discuss your findings with the rest of the class. If possible, audio record
the improvised argument, so you can play it back for clarification.

ACTIVITY 11
Our final activity—and using real words! This exercise requires you to
manipulate and play with the following text.

A: You’re late.
B: I’m sorry.
A: Well—did you find anything?
B: In a way.
A: What do you mean?
B: But not what you expected.
A: Go on.
B: It was very dark. I couldn’t see. This is what I found.
A: It looks like you were right then.

Form pairs, A and B, and learn the lines allocated to you. With your
partner, discuss the possible contexts, subtexts and relationships in the
text. Think of it as an extract from a radio play. Decide upon two quite
different interpretations of the text and practise them, making sure the
meaning is clear in each case. Audio record each of your interpretations.
Swap your recordings with another pair of students and listen
carefully to the interpretations, a number of times if necessary. Compare
them. What meanings are created by each interpretation? How is voice
used to make those meanings clear? Consider specific variations in the
use of silence, pitch, pace, volume, intonation, tone colour and emphasis.
Share your findings with the pair who recorded the interpretation.
chapter 8
movement
Drama has traditionally been stored in books, or play scripts, which
consist of words. Working through this book, though, you will be aware
that drama is essentially action. Words are simply a part of that action.
Film, video and digital technology are modern ways of storing drama that
can hold images as well as words. In fact, in some genres, the images can
be far more important than the words. You can watch a thriller movie with
the sound turned down, or in a foreign language, and still follow what is
going on.
The images that are stored on film and digitally are only two-
dimensional, however. In the theatre and in improvised drama the action is
in real space, with real breathing, sweating bodies expressing real
feelings; holding and moving real things.
In this chapter we will be dealing with some horrific stories, but we will
start, perhaps surprisingly, by playing a movement-based party game.

ACTIVITY 1 MUSICAL STATUES

The class decides together on a group scene: on a beach, perhaps, or at a
night club or a fairground. One person will be the Controller. Get into
position as characters in that setting, doing something relevant and
 interesting that involves movement (not just sun-bathing).
The Controller starts playing some music, during which the figures
must move continuously. Whenever the Controller stops the music,
everybody must stop instantly, and freeze in whatever position they find
themselves. If you are caught moving, you must fall to the ground and
stay there, out of the game.
As you play, you will note that some of the frozen positions look quite
odd, or even absurd. When moving, they looked quite sensible.

As a foretaste of drama using movement, games should not be

underestimated. They may be fun, but they are not silly. You may know that
‘Ring a’ Roses’ re-enacts the great plague of London, and ‘Red Rover’ is a
war-game. We will now use movements based on musical statues that are
dramatic enough to tell symbolically the story of a massacre.

Images in Action
Movement, like language, is dictated by situation, roles and relationships.
This is obvious if you consider that Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey
may sit in an interview together, but they are unlikely to dance, and even
less likely to go cycle-racing together. Of course, there are any number of
opportunities for startling images and absurd comedy, if you match
movement with situations that don’t obviously fit: the Battle of Waterloo
played as a ballet, for instance, or a military factory staffed by ants (see
‘And in Plays’ here).
In this chapter we are going to show how situation, roles and
relationships open up possibilities for movement that will enrich the action,
and create more powerful meaning than words alone. As in Chapter 5 we
will start with a still image and bring it to life, but in this chapter, we are
blending the image with dramatic words that will be brought to life
through movement.
The image and the words relate to important stories from the darker side
of Australia’s history. The image relates to the Coniston massacre of 1928,
and the words to the Myall Creek massacre of 1838, when white settlers,
including police, deliberately set out to attack and murder two entire local
communities. These two true events are separated by ninety years and
thousands of kilometres but some aspects of them are chillingly similar. We
shall be binding them through movement into a single powerful drama that
conveys some of the shared significance of the two stories.
These stories remain sensitive issues for the Aboriginal descendants of
those involved. Whenever matters of cultural significance and difference
are discussed, it is necessary to tread carefully and respectfully, and to
beware of taking over what belongs to other people. We do not however
think that this should stop us exploring the issues that these two stories
raise, especially when we bring them together.
Drama itself gives us a way of living through and acting out other
people’s stories safely, by creating new fictional worlds. Instead of using
the original stories (though we shall refer to them often) we will create an
analogy, a fictional situation that mirrors the original, but is based on what
we as outsiders can make of what happened. Such fatal events as these
massacres have happened throughout historical time and everywhere, and
drama can give us a way of beginning to find out why, and what might be
the consequences. The village we create will not be Aboriginal, nor will
the dance be an Aboriginal dance (unless you have in your class people
versed in Aboriginal protocols and skilled in their dance forms).

The Death in the Village Drama

Look at the painting by Mary Joseph on overleaf. Talk together as a class
to begin to make sense of it; the basic story is much easier to interpret than
Farewell to Saigon.
Now, two people read aloud the following extract from Today We’re
Alive by Linden Wilkinson. As you listen, keep your eyes on the picture.
This play is a genre of theatre known as verbatim theatre, in which the
script is based on interviews with witnesses involved in a real-life event. In
this case, the massacre at Myall Creek was nearly two hundred years
before the play is set, and the witnesses are two descendants (Sally and
Jayson) of the Wirrayaraay People of the Kamilaroi nation who were the
victims of the massacre, and a white historian (Patrick).
You may like to read the whole play as an example of verbatim theatre;
it also contains lots of background material and educational resources on
the Myall Creek massacre and its aftermath.
EXTRACT
SALLY: Myall Creek at that time of the year is cold and miserable, late
afternoon. Like, sometimes I picture those who were massacred …
PATRICK: I’ve tried a few times, several times over the years, to be there at
the site at that time of night that the massacre actually happened in
the afternoon just before sunset or just on sunset …
SALLY: Like they was all you know camp fires at night, kids running around
playing and, um, people cooking and just doing their—making their
dinner or something …
PATRICK: And I just stand there and reflect on what happened all those years
ago and how horrific it all was.
SALLY:What would it have been like to be those people? Especially the kids
…
PATRICK:They arrived there, Fleming and his party, I think, at … as the
Aboriginal people were getting their evening meal together, you
know. Ah … say four o’clock or something that order.
JAYSON: They were just living their lives and these people just came along
and for no reason …
SALLY: And they came upon them and they never had a chance. When they
came upon them they never had a chance.
JAYSON: They captured them and tied them up to this long rope and took
them away over a slight rise.
PATRICK: Anderson in the hut couldn’t see what happened.
JAYSON: These guys only had three swords. And I mean that’s—and
Anderson only heard two shots. So I mean you know when you kill
twenty-eight people with just two shots you know and only three
swords and those poor people had to wait a hell of a long time for
their time to be slaughtered. You know, tied to a rope … !
PATRICK: The convicts rode at this tied-up group with their swords and ah …
decapitated them from horseback. I think that’s … I don’t know of
course …
SALLY: Yeah … just thinking what those people went through. I s’pose, after
they’d done it, all the pots would all still be boiling, the fires going,
but there would be no sound. And they made a bonfire of my
people’s bodies. Um. Must have been terrible, you know.
JAYSON: And then the men come home looking for their wives, their kids …

SALLY: It’s like your heart is hurting, your heart is breaking. Then the
convicts rode after the men, who survived. My great-great-great
grandfather survived both massacres. Him and his brother. Maybe
nine, ten years old. Must have been very traumatic for them, to have
been left alone. Amazing that he survived. God, God saved him for a
purpose.

From the earliest British settlement in Australia, there was a determined

Aboriginal resistance to the white invasion as the two groups’ interests
clashed. All too often the outcome of these unequal confrontations was
heavy Aboriginal casualties. The Myall Creek massacre in 1838 was one
of the first recorded bloodbaths, leaving thirty dead.
The Coniston massacre, depicted in the painting, occurred in 1928.
After four years of drought in the desert outback, Aboriginal people were
forced to compete with the settlers’ sheep and cattle for limited water
resources. The flashpoint came when Aboriginal people killed a white
dingo trapper. A party of white settlers, led by Mounted Constable
William Murray, attacked the Aboriginal community when they were
engaged in their ceremonies. Official white history reports that 31 people
were killed, but tribal accounts put the number as high as a hundred men,
women and children. Still today the Warlpiri people remember these
events as ‘the killing times’.
There are some marked similarities in these two works, besides the
numbers of dead and the story of white settlers (and the convicts who
worked for them) massacring an unarmed and unsuspecting black
community. The young artist, Mary Joseph from Areyonga near Coniston,
and the characters Sally and Jayson describing Myall Creek, are all
descendants of the actual people involved, and their images and words
convey the force of personal emotion they bear, down the generations. In
the process drama we create in this chapter, we will be using movement to
explore and interpret the imagery and the words, and the meaning they
carry, both to the people involved and to outsiders like Patrick the historian
—and ourselves as we look at the painting. And that means stepping
inside … literally stepping.

Movement and Stillness

In the frozen moment of the painting, there is much movement suggested.
The word ‘moment’ originally comes from the word ‘movement’. Where
there are people, our eye always expects to see movement—stare closely
at the picture, and you may find the figures seem to move as your eye
travels. When people are ‘frozen’, the moment is made significant
because it is unexpected.

ACTIVITY 2 LIFE IN THE VILLAGE

Play Musical Statues (Activity 1) again. This time, the scene is one of
village life. If you have somebody in the class familiar with traditional
Aboriginal community life, you may want to set the scene as an
Aboriginal place. Otherwise, leave it vaguely as ‘a traditional village’ since
in any case we are going to make this into a new story of our own, as we
did with Tuan’s story in the Refugee Family drama. Establish a picture of
traditional village life, with people going about their everyday business,
which again involves constant movement. As before, use music, with the
Controller freezing the action to create unusual and odd shapes and
patterns as you freeze.
Danger in the air
Play Musical Statues again, but now the atmosphere has changed:
danger is in the air. The Controller substitutes a drum or tambour for the
music, and sets up a slow, menacing beat. The freeze signal is a loud,
single or double beat, then silence. When everybody freezes, it is in order
to listen, intently, for the approach of the enemy.
Fate holds a gun
Pause the game, and appoint a second Controller, Fate, who holds a
pointer representing a gun. The village is surrounded by an armed
reprisal party. Your drama space is a compound and you are trapped
inside. The first Controller drums as before, but this time alternating fast
and slow. The villagers move to the speed of the drumbeat, trying to
avoid the pointer, which Fate moves slowly and randomly. (This can be
more effective if you hold it more as the ‘Pointer of Fate’ than as a gun.)
When the freeze beat happens, everyone must freeze, except the second
Controller, Fate, who will touch with the pointer the nearest villager. That
villager must immediately fall to the floor, exactly where they are, and
take no further part. When the drumbeat begins again, the others must
be careful to avoid those figures. When more than half the group has
been tapped and is lying motionless, stop the game.
Note the contrasts between the villagers’ fleeing, their frozen terror,
and the slow stalking of Fate. As the game progresses, a new quality
 creeps in: the contrast between the fleeing figures and the motionless
corpses.
It may be that the games you just played merely stayed good fun, like
a version of tag. Perhaps, though, some of the power of what the game
was representing did seep into the work, through Mary Joseph’s painting,
and helped maintain a serious, tense atmosphere. If so, the contrast
between movement and stillness would have contributed to that effect.

Contrast
Look again at the painting. See how the painter uses colour to pick out
and emphasise the stillness among all the movement. All the running
figures are black; the trees and mountains are solid blocks of colour. The
rearing horse is black, but see how sinister the mounted white man is, so
precisely painted and still. His very colourfulness seems wrong, out of
place. Note too the defiant brown slash of the boomerang thrower, and
the pitiful red splashes anchoring the fallen victims.
In the next exercise, as you explore contrasts in movement, think about
ways you can manage your space. Explore the patterns you create—
symmetrical and asymmetrical. Explore variations in:
rhythm and pace
physical levels and directions
proxemics (your distance and position relative to others).
As you practise and refine your movement the game will become more
dramatic.

ACTIVITY 3 WE ALL FALL DOWN

Go back to the game as you played it last and re-enact it. Don’t try to
make it look literally like the painting, or like the Myall Creek scene
described by Sally and Jayson. It’s still a game, remember. However, as
you play, be very aware of the whole picture of yourselves in the space,
and explore that contrast between movement and stillness. Controller:
use the drumbeat consciously to control the contrast.
Expressive Movement
In the painting, we can start to see how movement expresses not only
action (what’s happening), but mood and symbols (what it all means). We
are now going to turn this story into expressive and symbolic dance. Don’t
worry if you think you can’t dance very well. Neither can we, and it
doesn’t matter.

ACTIVITY 4 THE LIFE OF OUR PEOPLE

Eventually this activity will involve the whole class, but for sections of it
you will need to work by yourself or in small groups.
1. Go back to the first part of Activity 2: Life in the Village and play it
again. Look very carefully at the sequence of movements you were
making for the actions and tasks of a villager.
2. Take a sequence of about thirty seconds, and re-enact it a number
of times, repeating exactly what you did. If your activity involves
working with other members of the class, so much the better.
3. In a whole-class discussion, fill in the details of your village. Make
room for all those activities that people in the class have been
depicting and working on. Give the village an appropriate name, and
agree upon:
what sort of a village it is
what climate it has
what skills you might need to survive.
4. Now each person (or small group) go back to your movement
sequence and view it in terms of your new shared knowledge: If I
really were one of those villagers, what precisely would I be doing?
Getting the details of your sequence of movements just right helps
give you (and an audience) belief and understanding in your
character, even when you are only doing it in mime.
5. Let the Controller begin with a fairly brisk drumbeat, and in your own
spaces re-enact your movement sequence. Try to find some kind of
 rhythm to the movements, even if it seems to make them less real.
Fit the movements to the beat of the drum.
6. Now take just a section of that sequence, no more than fifteen
seconds, which involves the most interesting or significant
movements. Go through this fifteen seconds again and change it in
two ways. First, slow it down to half pace—the drumbeat will help
you do that. Then, exaggerate the movements to make it twice as
big as real life. (It may feel a bit silly at this stage, but try to stay
concentrated.)
7. Keeping it at half pace, practise your new routine to the original
brisk drumbeat, so you will be moving slowly compared to the
drumming. When you come to the end of your sequence, find a way
of segueing back into the start without breaking off, so it becomes a
continuous loop of movement like a film or video loop. Now fit your
sequence in with those of the other people around you.
8. Find some music that fits in with the rhythm and the mood of these
movements, and fit your combined sequences to that. Now you are
dancing. You have just created the Dance of the life of our people.

ACTIVITY 5 THE DEATH OF OUR PEOPLE

1. Now go back to Activity 3 and re-create the movements you used
when trying to escape and when being cut down, one by one.
2. Build this into a whole-group dance sequence following the same
steps as you did in Activity 4. Pay attention to bringing out the
power of stillness among movement. Look again at Mary Joseph’s
painting to see the patterns of running away and lying still that she
uses.
3. You could build the sequence around the figure of Fate holding the
pointer. Use the building tension to help establish an appropriately
varied drumbeat.
4. With the drumbeat in mind, find some music that conveys the
 drastically changed mood of this sequence, and that helps you keep
the rhythm.
You have just created the Dance of the death of our people. Put the two
dances together and you have the Dance of our history—a symbolic
retelling in dramatic movement of the shared significance of the stories
that underlie your fictional village, Mary Joseph’s painting and the oral
history account of Sally and Jayson.

ACTIVITY 6 MOVEMENT AND WORDS

Now we are going to add words to our performance, to expand the
symbolic power and resonance of the piece. The following words relate to
the Coniston massacre and are taken from the report of the Australian
Government’s Board of Enquiry (January 1929) into the killings.
In threes (two speaking the dialogue and the third reading the
findings), read the words aloud, as if you are speaking in a courtroom.

CHAIRMAN: You made a report dated 2 September 1928, but you did not
mention that a fifth aboriginal woman had been badly wounded.
Apparently she died but you did not seem to think it important to
detail when this happened?
CONSTABLE MURRAY: I don’t think it matters whether she died a minute or
hour afterwards.
CHAIRMAN: You refer to your tracker shooting a fleeing native with a rifle.
You didn’t report that either.
CONSTABLE MURRAY: I mentioned the fact that natives were killed but I did
not think it necessary to say who killed them.
CHAIRMAN: Did you in your report give the number killed?

CONSTABLE MURRAY: No.

CHAIRMAN: Why?
CONSTABLE MURRAY: I did not think it necessary at the time.

CHAIRMAN: If you were giving a report about the killing of the white
 people would you think it necessary?
CONSTABLE MURRAY: Yes.
CHAIRMAN: What police experience did you have before joining the
Central Australia Police?
CONSTABLE MURRAY: None.

THE BOARD’S FINDINGS:The evidence of all witnesses was inconclusive, and,

after exhaustive enquiry lasting three weeks, the Board found the
shooting was justified, and that the natives killed in the various
encounters … were on a marauding expedition, with the avowed
object of wiping out the white settlers, and the native boys on these
stations. In respect to the shooting of 17 natives … the shooting
was justified. Respecting the shooting of 14 natives … the shooting
was justified.

You are going to make a soundscape of words to form a symbolic

commentary on your dance-drama.
In plays, we usually start with the words. Movement is then devised to
fit in with and illustrate or amplify what the characters intend by those
words. That’s why in many play scripts there are very few stage
directions—the playwright leaves the movement to the actors and
director to work out. What we are doing now is the opposite of that. Here
it is the movement that counts most, and the words will just underscore
and illuminate what is happening.
Choose your words from this transcript or from the Myall Creek extract
here. To help you choose, you might like to try bits of both. You will
discover that they interact with the movement quite differently.
The Coniston massacre transcript is written in a cool and distant
style, the Board of Enquiry conveying the impression that their
findings are fair and unbiased. Do you think they were? (Some
people at the time described the report as a ‘whitewash’).
The Myall Creek description is sad and emotional. The characters
were empathising with the events as they retold them.
You may find that the words of Sally and Jayson reinforce the
 atmosphere and mood of your dance-drama; alternatively, the cold
language of the Coniston Enquiry may create a more startling contrast,
counterpointing the terrible action on stage.
Pick out just a few highly charged words, phrases or sentences and
write them down—remember the exercises on language economy in
Chapter 7. Don’t look for words that will narrate the story, and don’t try to
tie your text to the rhythm of the dance itself. Rather, think of
highlighting the movement with the contrasts of sound and silence,
powerful moments and pauses.
As you experiment, listen to the rhythms of the words and see how
they fit alongside the rhythms of your dance. Some powerful words or
phrases could be repeated, perhaps chanted, or could echo through long
moments of the dance. There are many ways of bringing voice into play,
too: shouted startlingly or whispered hauntingly; clipped and staccato or
sliding and elongated. Remember the power of moments of silence, too.
The simplest way to incorporate this soundscape would be to do it live:
speakers simply step out of the dance (taking care not to disrupt the
flow) and deliver the lines. This can be timed exactly, and will bring an
immediacy to the soundscape. Alternatively, you could record it and
have it backed by the music or on a separate track alongside.

Movement and ceremony: laying the ghosts

After the massacre, the two true stories diverge, and so do their legacies.
In the case of Coniston, the court declared the killings ‘justified’ and the
killers went free, while most of the perpetrators of the Myall Creek
massacre got what even at the time many thought was ‘their just deserts’:
seven of the eleven perpetrators were hanged, with some public opinion
on the side of the victims. Since then, at Myall Creek there has been a rare
and moving attempt to lay the ghosts on both sides. Nearly two hundred
years after the massacre, descendants of the perpetrators and the victims
came together to create a joint memorial (overleaf). This consists of a fifty-
ton stone with a plaque at the site of the killings, a ceremonial walkway
leading to it, and notices telling parts of the story along the path.
This massive monument was craned in over the trees of Myall Creek on
10 June 2000, the anniversary of the massacre, with a solemn yet joyous
ceremony: a big crowd of the descendants, their friends and sympathetic
onlookers, and an ABC helicopter peering down through the trees to film
the event.
These are the words of one of those descendants, describing the
ceremony:
SALLY:Our kids was the first ones to dance there since they was all
massacred. It was my grandchildren that danced. We had a big
celebration … We got the red wattle: that was the blood that was
shed there. I just feel that because it was the first one where the
perpetrators was punished, it was really, really—a relief. Like a peace
… Sometimes I think about, I sit down and think … I know there’s
peace there now. You feel a peace there now, when you walk there. I
just feel good. That we’ve done it.

ACTIVITY 7 WE REMEMBER THEM

Each year on 10 June at the Myall Creek memorial site there is a well-
attended commemoration. So some of the ghosts have been laid. But
this has not happened at Coniston, nor, yet, for our fictional village. Let’s
imagine, though, that it has. Dance was an important feature of that first
Myall Creek reconciliation ceremony, and so it can be for ours. Can you
now reshape your dance, or add to it a brief section, to turn it into your
Dance of reconciliation? This time use some of Sally’s words as a
soundscape, or perhaps some words from the inscription on the plaque.
Find some appropriate music to form a backing track that underscores
the emotion (but not so loud that it drowns the words of the
soundscape). Your dance now has three ‘movements’—in the musical
sense of the term, too—the dance of the life of our village, the dance of
the death of our village, and the dance of our reconciliation.
Imagine if something like what you have created, and what happened
at Myall Creek, could happen for Coniston too. Mary Joseph’s painting is
an eloquent contribution, but as a Myall Creek descendant observed:
PEGGY: You’ve got to have your heart in it. And you’ve got to have more
than just money. It was like I just didn’t have any choice in it. I think
the whole experience just changed me. And it will change you too.
You might like to use some of those words in your dance, perhaps as a
finale.
AND IN PLAYS …
THE INSECT PLAY by Josef and Karel Čapek
This classic, funny and chilling fable was first produced in 1923, just after
World War I. In hindsight, as you will see from this short extract, it seems
to be prophetic (Josef Čapek died in a Nazi concentration camp; his
brother Karel died just after Hitler’s invasion of their beloved
Czechoslovakia).
The playwrights examine human society by analogy with the insect
world. Apart from an old drunken tramp, who is an observer, all the
characters are insects, so the opportunities for movement are rich. In Act
1, the tramp meets the traditional upper classes, the butterflies—beautiful,
callous and self-centred. In Act 2 he observes the capitalistic middle
classes, bugs and beetles, who ruthlessly devour each other in their pursuit
of profit and personal security.
Our extract is taken from Act 3, where the tramp is still searching for
what makes humans greater than insects. He stumbles over an ant-heap, a
totalitarian dictatorship where individual struggles are submerged in the
‘common good’.

EXTRACT FROM ACT 3: THE ANTS

BLIND ANT: Blank, two, three, four—blank, two—

CHIEF ENGINEER: We must quicken the speed.

2ND ENGINEER: The speed of output.

CHIEF ENGINEER: The Peace of Life—

2ND ENGINEER: Every movement must be quickened.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Shortened—

2ND ENGINEER: Calculated—

CHIEF ENGINEER: To a second—

2ND ENGINEER: To the nth of a second—

CHIEF ENGINEER: So as to save time—

2ND ENGINEER: So as to increase the output—

CHIEF ENGINEER: Work has been too slow—labour must be carried out
unsparingly—
2ND ENGINEER: Ruthlessly—

TRAMP: And what’s the hurry, anyway?

CHIEF ENGINEER: The interests of the whole.

2ND ENGINEER: It is a question of output—question of power.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Peaceful competition.

2ND ENGINEER: We are fighting the battle of peace.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Faster—faster—

An ANT collapses with its load and moans.

2ND ENGINEER: Tut, tut! What’s that? Get up!

ANOTHER ANT: Dead!

CHIEF ENGINEER: One, two—carry him away, quick.
2ND ENGINEER: He died honourably in the cause of speed.
CHIEF ENGINEER: How are you lifting him? Too slowly, you’re wasting time.
Drop him. Now head and feet together. Blank, two, three—wrong,
drop him again. Head and feet—blank, two, three, four—take him
away—blank, two, blank, two, blank—
2ND ENGINEER: Two, three, four—quicker.
TRAMP: Anyhow, he died quick enough—

CHIEF ENGINEER: Work, work, he who possesses more, must work more.
2ND ENGINEER: He requires more—

CHIEF ENGINEER: He has more to defend—

2ND ENGINEER: And more to gain.

CHIEF ENGINEER: We are a nation of peace—peace means work.

2ND ENGINEER: And work, strength.

CHIEF ENGINEER: And strength, war.

2ND ENGINEER: Yes, yes!

As You Prepare to Perform

It may not seem as if there is very much movement at first reading, but
while the engineers are talking, the stage is actually teeming with ants, all
working to the beat of the blind ant’s counting.
If you have access to this play, look at some of the other acts, the
creepers and crawlers especially, and see how insect movement
possibilities enrich the action.

THINK ABOUT
What might the ant movements be? Remember, they are ants. Their
leaders are called engineers—that should give you a movement clue.
What kinds of tasks might they be doing, and for what reasons?
When the ant collapses, what happens to the drumbeat and the
 movements?

TRY OUT THE SCENE

1. Either as a whole class, or starting in small groups then combining
them, improvise whatever sort of movement seems appropriate to you.
2. When you have decided on basic movements, spread them so that
they take up the whole space—in clumps, lines and circles; with
varied movement patterns, contrasting and interesting. Can you use
different height levels? What about varying the size of the movements,
making them minute or exaggerated? Symmetry and balance will be
very important to help give the sense of automatons.
3. Experiment with giving the ants burdens: sticks, rods or ropes to link
them.
4. Now fit the movements to the beat of the blind ant who has a drum.
5. When the ant collapses, experiment with them all getting out of
control and moving chaotically, until the Chief pulls them back into
order.
chapter 9
mood
Remember when you arrived for your first day of secondary school—how
did you feel? Or when your school was given an unexpected holiday—
how did you feel then?
Your feelings about these two events would have been different but there
would have been strong emotions associated with each of them. Almost
everybody starting secondary school feels apprehensive and uncertain,
while most are thrilled at an unexpected holiday. There is a shared mood
and atmosphere created by the event.

Creating Mood
Put together all the elements we have investigated so far and we have
mood. It is the feeling or atmosphere that is created by, and emerges
through, the dramatic action. In this chapter, we look at ways mood can
be built into the drama.

ACTIVITY 1
ROLES
Make pairs: A is a student of about your age; B is one of A’s parents.
 SITUATION
A: you have arrived home from school and gone straight to your bedroom,
obviously upset. At school today, you were embarrassed and hurt in front
of friends—you decide why—perhaps a harsh comment from an
unthinking teacher, perhaps teasing by insensitive students.
CONSTRAINT
A: you feel hurt and don’t really want to talk about it.
MANAGEMENT
B: wait a while, then knock and enter. Try to find out what the problem is.
Be sympathetic and supportive and work gently with your child. Let the
role-play build slowly.
OUTCOME
The outcome will emerge from the action. Is the problem revealed?

Before we discuss the mood created in this role-play, try one more.

ACTIVITY 2
ROLES
Make groups of four. A, B, C and D are all members of a high-powered,
successful computer firm.
A is the boss, overworked and fast talking.
B is the personal assistant to the boss, extremely efficient and fast
talking.
C is a top salesperson, successful and fast talking.
D is the personal secretary to the top salesperson, fussy and fast
talking.
SITUATION
Sales have slumped and C is trying to convince the boss to spend an
extra $500,000 on television advertising. The decision must be made
 urgently.
MANAGEMENT
B and D keep interrupting the discussion between A and C (perhaps a
letter to be signed, an urgent telephone call—make the reasons up). A
and C must deal quickly with these interruptions before returning to their
discussion.
Let the action develop with constant interruption and speedy problem
solving.
OUTCOME
After about three minutes B advises that A is running late for an
important appointment, and must leave at once. A hurries off, making a
decision before leaving.

Each of these role-plays established a particular mood, but a quite

different one. The first had a quality of intimacy and sensitive inquiry; the
second of frantic, chaotic decision making. What factors created these two
different moods?

ACTIVITY 3
With a partner, discuss how the different elements of drama were used in
the two role-plays. Using the table opposite, list the differences as you
isolate them.

ELEMENT OF Activity 1: What happened at school Activity 2: The advertising

DRAMA today campaign

TENSION

FOCUS

TIME
PLACE

NARRATIVE

LANGUAGE

MOVEMENT

Mood and Tension

From the lists you just created, it is clear the different elements of drama
were used in different ways to create different moods. You may have
already observed that mood is something we feel about the dramatic
action. In this way it is closely linked with tension: as the tension in a
drama builds so too does the mood. And as the mood builds, it in turn
reinforces the tension. But the mood of a piece of dramatic action can
change too, often in response to a change in the source of tension.

ACTIVITY 4
ROLES
Make groups of three. A and B are the parents of C, who is a promising
swimmer, one of the best in the country. C loves swimming and the
parents, A and B, are proud of their child.
SITUATION
A arrives home from work with bad news for B: A has been sacked and is
out of work. The chief concern is how the family will manage financially
on a greatly reduced income. While A and B are wrestling with what this
means, C arrives home from school full of news and excitement, having
been selected to attend a prestigious swimming coaching clinic in
California. Attending the clinic will cost $10,000.
MANAGEMENT
 Let the improvisation develop slowly, taking the time necessary for the
initial mood to develop before C arrives home.
OUTCOME
You decide the outcome. Can the money be found? Don’t jump to an
easy, unlikely solution (e.g. suddenly finding you’ve won gold lotto).
REFLECTION
Well, did you give this activity a happy ending or a sad one? As long as it
worked for you, either could be appropriate. Spend some time discussing
the following questions.
Did you notice the development of contrasting moods in the
activity?
How would you describe those moods? Which was dominant at the
end?
How closely related was the change of mood to the change of
tension?

Intensifying Mood
In a play or film, the director can use music to enhance the mood,
capitalising on our sense of hearing. In improvised drama we are able to
appeal to all five senses to create mood: what we hear, see, and touch (or
what touches us); what we taste and what we smell.
A group of fifteen year olds exploring climate change through drama
wanted to examine the effect of major fires on people’s lives, and the
management and conduct of emergency services.
All students took the roles of a group of exhausted fire fighters, who
after four days have still not brought the inferno under control. Then they
divided into two groups, each finding a separate room or space in their
school to work.
Each group set up their space as a Rest and Recovery Station for
volunteer bush fire fighters, and prepared the space to receive the other
group.
To establish the mood, they decided they would draw on all the five
senses as they decided on the following effects to create the reception
centre for their shattered friends:
smoke haze in the room
food and water bottles laid out
chairs and camp beds scattered around
TV reports playing in the background
washing up areas
mobile phones ringing with updates and news
a two-way radio desk constantly sending and receiving crackling
messages from fire trucks in the field
Hi-vis overalls.
Consider which sense responds to each of these effects. When mood is
created through all five senses participants can become deeply immersed
in the experience of the drama.
The scene ran for about twenty minutes, with kindly volunteers offering
their help to the exhausted fire fighters. Each group devised their activities
to reinforce the mood. If you like the idea, you could recreate the event in
your drama class.

ACTIVITY 5
Plan carefully, in groups of five or six, how you will create a mood
appropriate for a drama involving a hospital or a shopping centre. What
effects will you include? How can you appeal to all the senses? Create
this setting and share it with other groups to see how they respond. How
effective is it in creating the mood you want? What could be improved?
You could use the mood you have created with this setting in a piece
of your own dramatic action that fits this atmosphere—exploring life,
death, care or negligence in a hospital; or shoplifting, profiteering or
busking in a shopping centre.

AND IN PLAYS …
SHOTGUN by Rock Surfers Theatre Company
Read this account of Shotgun, a theatre piece by Melbourne’s Rock Surfers
Theatre Company.
Common sense says you don’t get into a car with a stranger and
allow them to lock the doors.
But that is exactly what the Rock Surfers Theatre Company expects
its audience to do in the ominously titled Shotgun, an immersive
micro-theatre experiment in which a parked car serves as stage and
auditorium.
In each performance, three people will get in a car, the doors will
lock, the radio will go on and an actor in the front seat will tell a
darkly funny story for about ten minutes. Different actors will take the
front seat for different performances.
Shotgun is one of several site-specific or found-venue productions
playing in the inaugural Spectrum Now festival. The shows are
designed to shake up the conventional relationship between audience,
performer and performance space.

As You Prepare to Perform

It will be obvious from this account of Shotgun that mood will play a large
part in the success of these ten-minute micro-theatre experiments. Different
makes and models of cars do not look or feel the same, the exterior and
interior of each car make it a unique space with its own mood and this is a
simple but powerful pre-text for making theatre. You can continue this
experiment by using stationary vehicles to serve as the setting for your own
theatrical purposes.
1. As a class, make a list of the different types of cars you may have
access to—those of your parents, older brothers and sisters, relatives
in car clubs, grandparents.
2. List the qualities of each car—immaculate, battered, shiny, smelly,
messy, neat and tidy, loved, unloved.
3. Note which cars could most easily suggest a particular mood—safe
and respectable, hippy trippy, family, battered outback, sinister …
and so on.
4. Break into groups of three or four and select a vehicle you can access
from your list. Devise a scenario—a dramatic storyline—specifically
for that vehicle and an ‘actor in the front seat’ (not necessarily a
driver). The scenario should relate to and heighten the mood you have
identified and should last just a few minutes rather than the full ten
minutes in Shotgun.
5. After determining your scenario and the character in the front seat,
consider how you might intensify the mood you want to establish in
your vehicle. How might adding a P-plate and scattering old
hamburger wrappers alter the mood?
6. Once you have planned your piece of mood-driven micro-theatre, see
if you can convince the owner of the vehicle to leave it with you and
your class for a couple of hours. Dress it as you have planned and
then invite other students to view it and experience your theatre
experiment. Tidy up at the end of the work—be sure to leave the car
as you found it!
7. Share experiences across groups. What mood was established in
each car? How successfully? What might have heightened the mood
further? Were any shifts of emotional level created (from threatening
to dangerous, happy to celebratory, pleasure to elation)? How did the
other elements of drama influence the mood?
8. If, after all this, you still have willing and supportive car owners,
maybe they will let you borrow their cars once more so you could
stage your own festival of site-specific theatre for your local
community.
chapter 10
symbols
A woodcutter’s axe glints as it rises slowly, then flashes down, neatly
splitting a log into firewood, which the woodcutter will take inside to the
hearth. This is already powerfully symbolic of warmth and security, the
strong arms of a caring head of the family … but … on the edge of the
forest lurks civil war, and the unseen forces of greed and repression
approach.

Symbols and Meaning

This is the opening moment of a play. Months later, driven to despair with
his livelihood gone and his family torn apart, the same man raises his axe
once more. This time, it is not to split firewood, but to strike back at his
tormentor. No longer a woodcutter, he has become a revolutionary, and
the axe has become a weapon. This is the final moment of the play, and
the axe is the central dramatic symbol that crystallises the dramatic
meaning and sums up in a single image the drastic changes chronicled in
the play.
Symbols in drama help you to understand more deeply the dramatic
meaning. They can provide a powerful point of tension, crystallise a
moment of significance in the play or, as above, sum up a crucial
meaning. They often work on an unconscious level, where we register
them without being aware of it.
Symbols can be expressed through language, movement and visual
images—think of the medals and the award ceremony in the Drugs in
Sport drama, the hidden letter to yourself in the Refugee Family drama,
and the dance you created symbolising life and death in the Death in the
Village drama? All of those importantly helped to create and reinforce the
meaning of the whole experience.

Gestures as Symbols
Our hands and how we use them already carry enormous symbolic
meaning in real life. You probably know people who talk as much with
their hands and arms as with their tongues.
Did you know that a handshake probably started as a way of
indicating: ‘I am friendly and will do you no harm—look and feel; I have
no weapon in my right hand … have you?’
A number of variations of the handshake have evolved to convey
different symbolic meanings. Freemasons (a secret society for men, very
powerful centuries ago and still operating) have a secret handshake so
they can recognise each other without letting outsiders know. Two
thousand years ago Roman warriors ‘shook hands’ by grasping each
other’s thumb. You and your friends may already have some special
handshake of your own.
The simple handshake can be immensely powerful in drama, too.

ACTIVITY 1
STEP ONE
Let’s try two handshakes that have evolved in recent years with very
different symbolic messages. The first, we are told, is how some
Ethiopian teenagers greet each other. Try it with a partner, using your
right hand. It is in three parts:
make a ‘high five’—which you will all be familiar with (another
modern symbolic greeting)
put your hand over your heart
 raise your hand and click your fingers briskly, and say to the other
person something like, ‘Hey, how you doing!’
Starting from a little distance away, as if you were approaching on the
street, greet your partner with this ‘handshake’, then find somebody else
and greet them … and someone else …
You will notice how much energy this creates, an immediate warmth
and excitement. What do you think the three parts symbolise?
STEP TWO
In complete contrast is another greeting, also from Africa. It was invented
in South Africa during the last days of apartheid. (Until its defeat in 1992,
apartheid was the government policy of South Africa which separated
white and black people, with extreme discrimination against the latter.)
Sometimes known as the ‘unity handshake’, it combined the traditional
western handshake with that of black Africans and Afro-Americans (and
Roman warriors), and in dangerous times was an unspoken symbol of
solidarity against apartheid. In order to show proper respect it must be
done very slowly. It also is in multiple parts:
stand facing your partner and extend your right hand to take your
partner’s in a normal western handshake grip, at the same time
bringing your left arm across your body to gently support your right
elbow
grasp your partner’s hand firmly and hold it for a moment but don’t
pump it up and down as we generally do
slowly change your grip so you each slide your hand round to grasp
your partner’s thumb (the Roman warrior clasp); hold it for a
moment
now slide it back so you are again in a standard handshake, then let
go.
You can be speaking while doing this, and certainly should be holding eye
contact.
It must all be done very slowly, as a kind of ritual, to show proper
respect. You may feel inclined to giggle, as you don’t share the gravity of
a pact against oppression, and may not feel especially respectful
towards your partner. But try it two or three times to get it working
smoothly, and you will get a sense of its symbolic significance. And you
may feel more respectful towards your partner.

ACTIVITY 2
Now, just to lighten up, let’s explore some other symbolic gestures. With
your partner join up with another pair. In your small group try out the
following gestures and see if you find a common meaning:

Now make a list and try out all the other common gestures—including
the rude ones!—which have a shared meaning in our shared culture. If
there are people in your group with different cultures of origin, try out
some of theirs, too.

ACTIVITY 3
SITUATION AND ROLES
In the final moment of a classic process drama, two people shake hands,
and one says: ‘Yes, but now we are equal.’ One of the hands is black, the
other is not.
This is obviously a symbolic gesture summing up what has happened.
But what is it that has happened?
MANAGEMENT
 In small groups, suggest various storylines which could have led to this
symbolic moment and those words. List the scenes that could precede
the handshake as a series of titles, so that you will remember them. Try
some different scenarios. What is the significance of one of the hands
being black, the other not? Does it matter which person spoke the
words?
When you have decided on a scenario, improvise the final scene that
leads to the moment of the handshake, the climax. Be careful not to rush
it; you may need to introduce some kind of tension to slow it down. And
don’t overdo it and become melodramatic.
In your groups, work through the other scene titles you listed and see
if you can capture the essence of each scene in a moment of symbolic
gesture. You can use many characters, or just one. Your gestures will
probably involve hands, and perhaps other parts of the body too. Look at
how they are positioned, and if there is more than one character, their
relative positions to each other. Do you think the symbolic power of the
moment of the handshake would have greater significance for an
audience that knows the story and the characters?

Symbolic Objects
Some objects are in themselves rich in symbolic association. A procession
holding candles, for instance, is more theatrical than a procession without.
Add masks, or hoods, to those holding the candles, and you have a
powerful image. A gun is another powerful symbolic object. There is a
saying in the theatre that if there is a gun on stage, you know it will be
used. However, no object is a dramatic symbol on its own. It must be
given meaning by the dramatic action. It is the easiest thing in the world to
lump a lot of objects together that have strong symbolic potential, and
hope to fool people that you have a more powerful play or film than you
actually do.

ACTIVITY 4
 You can have fun with symbols. In small groups or as a whole class make
a list of objects that have intrinsic symbolic value. A bloody dagger, a full
moon, a hooting owl, a diamond ring, a snake, a rose, a lion, footprints in
the snow—that is just for starters. Devise a scene where you pack as
many of them in as you can—a horror story, or a romantic fantasy. You
can include the actual objects, or you can simply mention them in the
dialogue. Give each one its full symbolic significance, and go right over
the top!

Dramatic Symbols
Unlike the things you were just playing with in the last activity, the axe and
the black-and-white handshake are truly dramatic symbols. The action
changed those objects and gave them new meanings, unique to the
drama. In other words, the truly dramatic symbol has a meaning that is
greater than itself and its immediate significance.
The object, to begin with, need not be symbolically significant at all.
After all, Shakespeare made much of a handkerchief, an unposted letter, a
donkey’s head; and in one of the most famous films ever made the tension
is built entirely on the central symbol of a child’s toboggan. And there are
several examples in the dramas you have yourselves created.
In the Death in the Village drama, the central symbols—the dance
movements—started as mere fragments of gestures representing the
village occupations, but when put together they came to symbolise the
life of the village, and the drama’s tragic outcome.
The black and white handshake—in its original form, or in whatever
other context you gave it—became a powerful gesture of
reconciliation, and an acknowledgment of equality by both
characters.
In the Refugee Family drama, the letter hidden under the floorboards
was created to be a symbol of regret and a ceremonial farewell to a
known life. When it was rediscovered in the scene twenty years on, it
added another set of symbolic meanings—proof to one character that
the other deeply cared, a gesture towards reconciliation, even an
apology.
Irony is an important dramatic device, where for a character a key
moment or a significant action means one thing while for the audience it
means the opposite. Irony is often the source of power of a really dramatic
symbol; its presence is revealed in the unexpectedness or even
contradictory nature of the symbol.
Think of the Drugs in Sport drama: the irony of setting a scene about
cheating and betrayal against the backdrop of the Olympic medal
ceremony, which is meant to stand for and celebrate true
sportsmanship and achievement.
The woodcutter’s axe starts as a symbol of peace and harmony, but
by the end it has become a symbol of the exact opposite: war and
resistance.
While the object that will carry the meaning of a symbol needs to be real
and tangible, the limitations of the classroom or the stage sometimes make
it difficult for an object to realise its full symbolic power. If a gun is
essential to a menacing scene, a toy gun—unless very realistic (which
anyway is illegal in schools)—will just burst the tension like a balloon. If
you need an eagle as a symbol of power, live ones are not easy to come
by and it’s hard to make a credible model. Then you need to use a symbol
of the symbol—a single feather will evoke an eagle much better than a
painted plastic chicken. Curiously, too, a simple stick is easier to take
seriously as a gun, exactly because it doesn’t look too much like the real
thing. Seems odd, but think about it.

AND IN PLAYS …
MOTHERLAND by Katherine Lyall-Watson
Motherland is an Australian play, part fact, part fiction, about the
displacement of people, cultural misunderstandings and memory. Three
true stories about exiles from Russia are strangely and coincidentally
entwined; two of them lead directly to Brisbane.
This extract is set in Moscow during the unrest in 1991 after the fall of
communism. Alyona is a historian and Sasha is her thirteen-year-old son.
(Eventually both end up in Brisbane, with Alyona married to Chris, an
Australian businessman. In a subplot Alyona is recording the memories of
Nina, a hard-to-please old woman, about her life in exile. These interviews
take place in the museum where Alyona works.)
The scene immediately preceding this depicts Chris’s first meeting with
Alyona and Sasha. Alyona is trying to bring Sasha and Nina safely
through the Moscow streets during the casual gunfire of an attempted
military coup, when Sasha has a seizure in a public toilet. Chris happens
to be in there and tries to help. He carries Sasha out, shouting in bad
Russian, only to be set on by a frantic Alyona who thinks he is abducting
her son. The language barrier does not help. Eventually, Chris helps
Alyona get Sasha to hospital, though she is still suspicious of him.

EXTRACT FROM ACT 1, SCENE 2

MOSCOW 1991—the hospital. SASHA walks in, eating strawberries.

ALYONA: Strawberries! Where did you get those?

SASHA: Chris brought them for me.

ALYONA: Chris?
SASHA: The Australian.

ALYONA: What’s he doing here?

SASHA: [shrugs] The nurses are showing him round. They’re like schoolgirls
around him. All giggly and stupid.
ALYONA: Don’t generalise, darling.
SASHA: You’d have laughed if you’d seen them, Mum. Even the old matron
started blushing when he came in.
CHRISenters and smiles to see ALYONA.

CHRIS: I was hoping you’d be here.

ALYONA starts to smile but catches herself and thrusts the

strawberries at CHRIS.
What’s this?
ALYONA: We no need. Thank you.

CHRIS: ever needs strawberries! You eat them because they’re delicious.

Seeing that ALYONA isn’t following him, he eats a strawberry.

Mmm.
 He holds them out to SASHA, who takes one.
ALYONA: We don’t need his charity, Sasha.

SASHA: You should try one, Mum. They’re really good.

ALYONA: You don’t take gifts from strangers.

CHRIShasn’t been able to follow anything they’ve said. He puts

the strawberries back in ALYONA’s hands.
CHRIS: Well … I … I suppose I’d better get back to the office. Glad you’re
doing better, mate.
Silence. They didn’t understand him.
[Speaking very slowly] I’ll come back later.
ALYONA: You no need. We okay.
CHRIS: I’d like to.

He exits.
SASHA: Did the doctors say when I can go home?
ALYONA: They want to keep you here for another night.

SASHA: Is there something wrong with me?

ALYONA: [distracted] Not enough iron or sunshine—that’s all. Nothing that

can’t be fixed.
SASHA: I feel fine.

ALYONA: Good.
SASHA: Can I have another strawberry?

ALYONA passes him one, stares at the strawberries, makes a

decision and takes the strawberries to the Museum, where she
gives the rest to NINA.
Nina: You’re trying to sweeten me up for your interview.

ALYONA: [to herself] It would take a hell of a lot more than strawberries.

As You Prepare to Perform

What do you think of when you see or taste a strawberry—does it have
any symbolic meaning for you already? Now add to those thoughts the
fact that in Russia in 1991 strawberries would have been a rare, exotic
and expensive luxury, not cheap and accessible as they are in Australia.
Before you try the scene out there are two elements of the performance
that need careful thought and management. The first is that there are two
separate scenes here. The first is set in the hospital and the second, a
scene of just a single interchange, is set in the museum. The playwright is
using the convention of keeping all actors on stage throughout the play,
and running the scenes without a break. Somehow it needs to be clear to
the audience when the scene changes, and where the action is now taking
place. How might you solve this question of focus, both in your design and
stage setting and in Alyona’s movement as she steps from one scene
(carrying the strawberries) straight into the other?
The other tricky element is the language. Alyona and Chris have
difficulties in understanding each other, and each seems to speak in two
quite different ways. Because an English-speaking audience would not
understand Russian, we have to hear Alyona and Sasha in English, though
of course they are speaking Russian to each other (which Chris won’t
understand). Alyona speaks broken English and Chris talks very slowly
when they are addressing each other.
Can you make all this clear in your performance? This is important,
because cultural misunderstanding is a strong theme in the play. Try also to
bring out the symbolic value of this imperfect communication, which
mirrors the awkwardness with the strawberries. You will probably find
pauses and meaningful looks between characters will convey this as
vividly as the words.
chapter 11
traditional dramatic meanings
If we look at drama as the art form that shows us what it is like to be
human, then the elements of drama are the human skeleton. The previous
ten chapters have each given you one of the important bones. But bones,
on their own, don’t mean much; they only work together. Put them together
and the skeleton looks like us, but more basic, and because of that it can
be either funny or scary.

Making the Skeleton Dance

Imagine you are a creator who can give the skeleton life. You can flesh out
the bones with whatever looks, talents and personality you like, and
breathe life and spirit into it—which gives you the power to do what you
want with it. (Doctor Frankenstein discovered the perils of that, of course,
when his creation got away from him!)
In drama we are the creators and, like a skeleton, the bones of drama
only work together. The human context—the situation, the people and their
relationships—are the flesh. The body is given shape and animated by the
way we focus those basic elements, and how we place them in space and
time. We breathe life into the body through the story and the tension we
create, and we give it language and movement to express itself, clothing
the drama with its mood and symbols.
 Before we get too carried away by our analogy of an all-powerful
Creator, we should note that our dramatic creation is still much simpler
than real-life human beings with their complex behaviour. It is in fact
simple enough for us to be able to comprehend it, and know what we are
trying to do with it. That’s what is good about it: whether as participants or
audience, we can make and grasp our own meanings out of the drama. In
this chapter, we will explore, through making drama and analysing it as
we go, how the skeleton is put together, fleshed out and animated. (The
word ‘animate’ literally means to breathe spirit into something.)
In this chapter, you will create a process drama that puts the elements
together to create a dramatic story with a set of meanings and
understandings about the situation and the people involved. In the next
chapter, we will explore some of the ideas of contemporary theatre and
drama that give our skeletal model a shake and provide new, unexpected,
and often richer meanings.
This, the final process drama of the book, works entirely through
improvised dramatic action as a coherent sequence of Scenes rather like a
standard play, instead of a collection of diverse Activities.

The Leaving School Drama

The key question we have chosen to explore is: What does it mean to
leave school?
This is probably something you have been wondering yourselves, and
something you will have to face quite soon. What will leaving school
mean to you? What does it mean to other young people? Parents?
Employers? Teachers? Let’s start to find out by looking at the Five Ws:
What’s happening, Where, When, to Who and What’s at stake.

SCENE 1 GOSSIP MILL

TENSIONS OF THE TASK, SUSPENSE AND SECRECY
SITUATION
The setting is a secondary school yard at morning recess. Four Year 10
students are reading some astonishing news on a social media site and
decide that everyone needs to hear it.

School Speak Easy

3 hrs

The secret’s out! What the State Government didn’t want you to hear! Calling all Year 10s …
Forget what you’d planned for Year 11. There’s a new Stone Age Education for ALL seniors,
including YOU!!! Are you a brain or a dummy? According to the Government you’re one or the
other, and THEY will tell you which. From NEXT YEAR!!! you will be sent either to a new
‘Academic College’ for at least three years, or a new ‘Technical College’ then kicked out after
one year! Coming soon to a school near you—and that means YOUR school. If you like it—suck
it up … If you don’t like it, suck it up too … OR you could always use direct action and
PROTEST!!!

216 likes 46 comments 37 shares

Like Comment Share

ROLES
You will play students from all secondary years, mostly in groups, doing
whatever you might be doing at recess (something appropriate for the
year group you have chosen for yourself). Decide on four students to be
the Key Group of Year 10 students who first read this newsflash.
MANAGEMENT
Make a space where you can all mill around in your groups. Read all the
instructions below then get into position to start the improvisation.
Key Group: you have all read the newsflash. Each decide for yourself
what you make of it. If it is indeed true, you would all be likely to some
extent to share the media site’s hostile reaction. You have decided you
have to tell everybody. Your strength of feeling might make some of you
exaggerate or embroider it a bit … or a lot! Moreover, you have only read
it briefly, and not necessarily entirely accurately. Be ready to spread the
news.
The other groups respond to it as you see fit. What does it mean to
you? How will it affect you, now or in years to come? Some of you may
think the news is actually a good thing. Discuss it with your friends and
then pass on what you have heard to somebody else. Don’t be afraid to
embroider it further … until everybody is talking about it, and creating a
ferment.
Start the improvisation with all groups going about their normal recess
activities, and then the Key Group spread out and starting the gossip mill
going.
OUTCOME
Give it time for everybody to be passing on and reacting to the
information (and misinformation). Cut the gossip mill while the
excitement and outrage are still on the rise and the rumours getting
wilder.

SCENE 2 THE TEACHERS

TENSIONS OF THE TASK AND DILEMMA
SITUATION
The buzz of excitement does not die down, in fact it rises towards
hysteria. By the end of the day, some students are planning protest
marches against the wildly rumoured new plan, while other students are
planning counter-demonstrations in support of it. Some have already
called their parents. By afternoon, the Education Department has
responded to the morning’s social media frenzy with a Media Release
and an email to principals, broadly confirming the substance of the social
media announcement. (This may sound far-fetched, but this kind of
division of senior schooling was once common in Australia and still exists
in many countries.) The Principal hastily convenes a staff meeting after
school to decide what to do.
ROLES
You are all now going to switch roles to look at the proposed plan from
the point of view of the teachers, who will also be affected. You can
 decide what subject you teach, and how long you have been teaching.

From: CEO, Department of Education and Training

To: All Secondary Principals

Australian Government
Department of Education and Training

Dear Principals,

Following irresponsible leaks in social media, the Minister has found it

necessary to prematurely release the Media Release below. Please ensure
that your school’s students, teachers and parents are informed of the
forthcoming changes as quickly and calmly as possible.

MEDIA RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Minister of Education and Training

To re-establish Australian schooling as the best practice in the world, I am

proud to announce a cutting-edge revolution in secondary schooling. All
senior schooling (Years 11 upwards) will be divided into two different
kinds of College:

Academic: a three-year course (Years 11, 12 and 13) where students

will be expected to study purely academic subjects until eighteen or
nineteen and then go on to University;
 Technical: a one- or two-year course (Year 11 and possibly Year 12)
where students will be educated in technical and trade subjects and
leave school at sixteen or seventeen to enter TAFE or the work force.

The plan will start at the beginning of next academic year.

Year 11 students will be assigned to Academic or Technical College based

on an examination, not personal choice. Teachers will be reassigned by
the Department, not by personal choice.

For further information, contact the Department of Education and Training.

MANAGEMENT
1. Set up the space for a staff meeting, with seats around a table. Have
copies of the Department email (opposite) on the table, or for the
Principal to distribute.
2. Stand in a circle, and in turn announce what subject you teach and
how long you have been at the school (i.e. how senior you are). Try
to achieve a realistic spread of staff and experience. You will need a
Principal, one or two deputy principals, and a school counsellor
perhaps (the teacher could take one of these roles).
3. Now move away from the table and form pairs or small groups,
waiting for the meeting to begin and discussing the rumours. Only
the Principal knows the facts, but most of the staff will have heard
rumours; some will have had to deal with disturbances or anxious
students, while quite a few may be still in complete ignorance.
4. The Principal sits, and the meeting begins. The Principal opens with
the following announcement (or something similar) then reads the
email aloud:
As staff, discuss the implications, and the question of what should be done about
the students’ planned protest. When everybody has heard the facts, discussed
 them and made some decisions, the formal meeting is closed.

REFLECTION (IN-ROLE)
5. Teachers, immediately get back into small groups again to talk
about the plan from your personal point of view. How will it affect
you and your career? What would be the differences between the
two new schools? Which College do you think you will be assigned
to, and how do you feel about that?

SCENE 3 THE KIDS

TENSIONS OF DILEMMA AND INTIMACY

SITUATION
It is the following morning again at recess. Two Year 10 students, close
friends, have read the Minister’s Media Release and discovered the full
truth behind the rumours. They don’t want to rush into a protest, but they
know they will be affected and want to discuss it with one another.
ROLES
Sky has great career ambitions, and really wants to go to university
(though not sure you are clever enough to get in, nor what you would
want to do afterwards). You have been nicknamed ‘Sky’ by your mates
for your sky-high ambitions.
Andy is an academically smart student who wants to leave school as
early as possible to start making money by joining a friend’s highly
successful home-builder business. You have been nicknamed ‘Andy’
(short for Handy Andy) because of your practical nature and down-to-
earth ambitions.
MANAGEMENT
Get into pairs and decide who will play Sky and who Andy. You’ll find it
easier to project yourself into this role-play as somebody else if it is not
with one of your real-life close friends.
 As you discuss the Minister’s plan, you realise there will be
advantages and disadvantages for you both, but you are worried that
you may be assigned to the ‘wrong College’. You also strongly want to
stay together for the rest of your schooling.
Without too much preliminary planning or backgrounding sit down
together as if you were meeting at recess as usual, and go straight into
the discussion. Make up what background you need as you go along, to
fit your particular circumstances and point of view.
REFLECTION
Stop the improvisation after seven to ten minutes. Still in-role, pair up
with another group or two, and compare how your discussions went, and
how each of you feels about the proposed changes.

SCENE 4 THE PARENTS

TENSIONS OF CONFLICT AND DILEMMA

This task will take considerably longer than the previous scenes, as you
will be improvising two separate scenes, one set in Sky’s family, and one
in Andy’s, and then bringing them together. In a way these two scenes
mirror each other. It would be sensible to take a whole session for it.
PRELIMINARIES
Keep the same pairs from Scene 3, and join with another pair (perhaps
the same members as for the reflection activity above). One is Pair X and
the other Pair Y. If there are any students left over, go to other groups,
keeping the attitude you developed in the last scenes.
SITUATION
Each scene takes place that evening, as first Sky, and then Andy, breaks
the news about the proposed schooling change to their family, who have,
unaccountably, not yet heard about it.
SCENE 4A SKY’S FAMILY
ROLES
Sky—played by the Sky from Pair X, playing the same role as in Scene 3.
Sky’s parent—played by Andy in Pair Y, and maintaining Andy’s basic attitude
to the issue. You will notice straight away that Sky’s parent does not share
Sky’s attitude. We can flesh that out with some backstory.
Parent: you are a second-generation working-class Australian whose own
parents arrived penniless after World War II to work on the Snowy Mountains
scheme, then moved on to gradually building up a practical business (trade or
retail, you decide what). You yourself left school at fifteen and helped build the
business into what it now is, a flourishing concern, but short-handed on the
practical side. You look forward to Sky leaving school and helping you make
the business something you can proudly leave to your children. To you, the
idea of a technical college and early school-leaving for Sky sounds entirely
appropriate.
Another member of Sky’s family—played by the Andy from Pair X.
This family member (you decide who it is) is to take whatever attitude is
likely to increase the dramatic tension. Stay realistic though.
Monitor and scribe—played by the Sky from Pair Y. The monitor’s role is to
watch the scene carefully and jot down any strong moments or arguments or
particularly striking lines—this will be important later.

MANAGEMENT
The scene opens with Sky starting to explain the new scheme to the
family … and just take it from there! Cut after five to seven minutes.
REFLECTION
Sit down out-of-role and, led by the monitor, discuss the main arguments
that arose, and a few of the choicer things that were said. Write these
down in note form and keep them for later.

SCENE 4B ANDY’S FAMILY

ROLES
Andy—played by the Andy from Pair X, playing the same role as in Scene 3.
Andy’s parent— played by the Sky in Pair Y, maintaining Sky’s basic attitude to
schooling. As with the scene above the parent does not share Andy’s attitude.
This parent also has a backstory.
Parent: you are a highly successful first-generation Australian (you decide
where you came from; your career). The first member of your family ever to
make university, you came to Australia to ensure a top-class education for
your own children, so they too can be successes at university and beyond. For
you, there is no question—the Academic College is a must.
Another family member—played by the Sky from Pair X.
This family member (you decide who it is) is to take whatever attitude is
likely to increase the dramatic tension. Stay realistic though.
Monitor and scribe—played by the Andy from Pair Y. The monitor’s role is to
watch the scene carefully and jot down any strong moments or arguments or
particularly striking lines—this will be important later.

MANAGEMENT
The scene opens with Andy starting to explain about the new scheme …
once again, just take it from there and cut after five to seven minutes.
REFLECTION
As in the scene above, get the main arguments, and some of the choicer
exchanges, down in note form.

SCENE 5 DISTORTING MIRRORS

TENSIONS OF CONFLICT, DILEMMA AND RITUAL
Now we will change the dramatic mode to become more theatrical.
1. Using your notes and what you remember of Scene 4A (Sky’s
family), condense the scene down to no more than 60 seconds of
action that conveys the essence of the scene and the arguments.
Practise it a couple of times to make sure it is clear to an audience,
repeatable and does not exceed the time limit.
 2. Next, take the notes from Scene 4B (Andy’s family), and do the
same.
3. Now put them together so that you can present them both within
the two-minute time limit without forgetting who you are supposed
to be, and in which family!
4. When everybody is ready, present your double scenes to the rest of
the class in turn, introducing the first part with: ‘This is Sky’s home’
and the second, ‘This is Andy’s home.’ Move straight from one group
to the next without pausing, applauding or commenting at all—until
the end!

SCENE 6 IRONIC CONSEQUENCES

TENSIONS OF RELATIONSHIP AND STATUS
PRELIMINARIES
We are now going to foreshadow Chapters 12 and 13 by letting you finish
this drama in your own way … sort of.
Go back into your original pairs as Sky and Andy. Only now, it is fifteen
years later. Out-of-role, work out the path of these two characters’
careers and what they are doing now. Together, decide what ironic twists
of fate combined with their own abilities and limitations to get them
where they are today.
SITUATION and ROLES
Things did not pan out as the kids wanted them to, at all. In spite of
studying hard, Sky did not pass the Academic examination, and had to go
to the Technical College and leave school early. Andy was not quite brave
enough to deliberately fail the examination, so ended up at the Academic
College and eventually University. So, separated, their lives drifted apart
and they fell out of touch. Fifteen years later, they meet accidentally.
Both life and drama sometimes hand out ironies, and one of the pair
has quite unexpectedly prospered, the other not. At thirty, one of them
feels fulfilled and content, the other not. Perhaps their current position is
partly the responsibility of their families (who were both happy to go
along with the examination results fifteen years earlier) … and perhaps
not. Beware of falling into the more predictable ironies. Surprise
yourselves!
Finally, there is today a considerable status gap between them, and
the former friends find the encounter awkward.
CONSTRAINTS
It must all be credible or at least not incredible—no convenient ‘magical’
short-cuts like discovering a hoard of gold or supernatural powers. You
can invent abilities in line with what you know of the character already—
Sky’s imagination or Andy’s practicality might have given them some
useful hobby or sideline that unexpectedly delivered for them.
Finish with one of them saying: ‘I guess the motto of that College of
mine was right after all!’ and the other replying: ‘Well mine wasn’t!’
(Never mind yet what the mottos were; we will come to that shortly.)
MANAGEMENT
1. Once you have worked out the histories of these two ex-friends,
improvise the meeting between them. Decide on a likely place for
them to meet, and what they would say to one another.
2. Now condense your improvisation into a 60 second scene that
portrays as economically as possible these two heroes’ different
pathways, and the barriers or differences that now lie between
them.
3. Practise the encounters a couple of times to polish them, and then
present them to the other pairs, preferably without stopping.
REFLECTION (OUT-OF-ROLE)
The two Colleges each had a badge with a logo and motto designed to
underline the kind of establishment they were and what they wanted for
their graduates. Have a go at designing one or both of those badges. If
you were to turn this process drama into a public performance, perhaps
 one of the mottoes would be an appropriate title for the play … it would
certainly be on the way to being a powerful dramatic symbol.

Further Reflection
We designed this drama so that all the elements of drama could be seen
operating together—the skeleton was dancing. Consider each of the
bones:
The Five Ws: the first four are spelled out scene by scene, in our
instructions for running the drama. The fifth (represented by the
tensions) is given in the subtitle to each scene. Check to see that they
were all present.
Focus: think about how the drama has been focused. Can you identify
any changes of focus? (You may want to refer to the ‘framing’
diagram here.)
Setting: right from Scene 1 the settings and how you used the space
were important. How did they help to frame the context, develop the
tensions and create mood?
Time and tempo: these were important factors in several ways. Can
you identify moments when these changed?
Narrative: draw the arc of narrative, referring to the diagram here.
Language and register: note key moments when these were significant
to the drama.
Movement: at what points were movement, gesture, and people’s
relative positions in the space important?
Mood: what different moods were created in each scene, and how
was this achieved?
Symbols: besides the motto, can you identify any symbolic objects or
references in the drama?
Meaning: perhaps the most important question, to make sense of this
chapter. What kinds of meanings about the theme of leaving school
emerged in this play? What different perspectives for you personally?
New insights into education?

You have created a straightforward drama here, in a conventional

naturalistic form, and if you do decide to develop it into a play, it will
probably end up similarly conventional—as a traditional well-made play.
Or will it?
chapter 12
contemporary dramatic meanings
In your discussion about the way the elements were working together in
the Leaving School drama, you will have noticed one dynamic that stands
out. All of the elements were present and connected with each other. In
fact this drama was designed to link the elements in a sequential, linear
and straightforward way. This ordering of the elements is common in many
genres of drama, including much of what you see in film and television,
and has come to be thought of as ‘the well-made play’.
With little variation, popular Hollywood feature films and whole
television series build fan followings by offering powerful but quirky
characters surrounded by dependent but quirky characters, placing them
in tense, high stakes situations with narratives that unfold in sequence
according to the logic of cause and effect. The other elements of time,
movement, language, and so on all play their part in creating gripping
drama which generally ends happily for the lead characters (and the
audience—after all there is the sequel or next series to set up).

The Elements of Drama and Contemporary

Theatre
In recent years however, many leading contemporary theatre makers have
been managing the elements of drama in uncommon ways. Driven by a
desire to create fresh and imaginative theatre experiences for audiences,
they are increasingly rejecting the logical, linear connections (that make
sense to the audience and provide an overall satisfying experience) to
instead create interesting fragments of action and combine them in ways
which often seem to collide rather than support each other.
We saw glimpses of this in Shotgun by the Rock Surfers Theatre
Company, which used a parked car as the location and setting for action.
The dramatic action arose directly out of the choice of space and place: a
parked car, which traditionally has nothing to do with theatre making at
all. In selecting that as both setting and venue for their play, the Company
was deliberately destroying the fourth wall, the invisible barrier between
actors and audience which cannot be crossed in traditional theatre. In
Shotgun, and in the plays you created as site-specific theatre, the elements
of drama, while all present, worked together quite differently. Tackling a
different version of the Leaving School drama will help make this clear.

Reimagining the Leaving School Drama

To start we will identify and shape four drama fragments, all related to
leaving school, then later assemble them in surprising ways. Let’s start by
gathering the fragments, some of which come directly or indirectly from the
initial Leaving School drama. Read through the following outlines of all
four fragments and decide which you would be most interested in
producing.

FRAGMENT 1 FERRIS BUELLER

This fragment is to be presented as a recording, a multimedia piece
connected with the idea of leaving school.
Many of you will know the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It follows the
events of the day Ferris Bueller, a senior high school student, skips
school to be with his friends. An extremely successful film (it was the top
grossing film of 1986) and now a cult classic, this film cruelly exposes
many of the problems schools have in trying to make education
meaningful and relevant to secondary school students.
TASK
Track down the clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off known as the ‘Anyone,
anyone’ teacher sequence. (You’ll find it easily on YouTube.) This is a
very funny spoof of a particular type of teaching, where the lesson
comes thick and slow as molasses to cover the students in boredom.
You are going to create a mash-up based on this scene. (The term ‘
mash-up’ comes originally from hip-hop music and refers to a recording
that combines separate tracks. Nowadays it refers to any mix of sounds,
film clips, still images, web content and spoken text.) Your mash-up will
rip and mix the clip from the movie with music, sound, video and any
other content, to create a playful parody of schooling.
Your mash-up can be as simple or as complex as you wish. You might
just replace the teacher’s droning ‘Anyone, anyone,’ with ‘no-one, no-
one,’ or ‘whatever, whatever,’ or be more adventurous and include
references from your own school or other clips about schools and
education, old and new—perhaps from Dead Poets Society (1989) or the
latest version of a High School Musical film.

FRAGMENT 2 CLOWN SHOW

This fragment deals with some hard facts about schooling and the
challenge here is to present the information in an engaging and
entertaining way.
In Scene 2 of the initial Leaving School drama, the email from the
Minister of Education announced:
a cutting edge revolution in secondary schooling … in order to re-
establish Australian schooling as the best practice in the world.
The wording implies that Australians are slipping behind their
international counterparts everywhere. In his ‘cutting edge’ proposal to
divide all senior schooling into ‘Academic’ and ‘Technical’ the Minister is
advocating an extreme form of what is known as ‘ streaming’. This is a
common practice in educational systems where students are separated
by academic ability for certain activities, classes or subjects. It probably
happens within your school.
However, what evidence is there for the Minister’s claim? Most
governments draw evidence from a world-wide survey published by the
OECD in 2011, known as the Programme for International Student
Assessment ( PISA), which tests the skills and knowledge of fifteen-year-
old students in more than seventy countries.

Fact Check 1: Are Australian students slipping behind international

students everywhere? The PISA survey confirms that:
Australian fifteen-year-olds’ scores on reading, maths and scientific
literacy have recorded statistically significant declines since 2000.
However, the survey also finds that:
Students in the Australian Capital Territory perform well above the
Australian average and frequently match the top performing
systems overseas (Finland, Shanghai and Singapore).

Fact Check 2: Is the way forward to stream Australian students, as in the

Minister’s proposal? According to PISA, factors which impact on student
results include:
the numbers of students in schools
the make up of the student body in terms of language, culture and
socioeconomic profile
how schools are structured.
Positive factors improving student outcomes include:
giving teachers more time to work collaboratively and to mentor one
another
ensuring that teacher education, textbooks and the curriculum all
support one another
shifting the age of selection to increase the amount of time
students spend in comprehensive schools [i.e. to delay streaming].
 Education reforms in Poland suggest this has helped improve
student performance in mathematics, reading and science.
TASK
Create a short circus clown show that incorporates the Minister’s press
release and these facts. You can also research this further and add your
own information. You might for instance discover the fact that some
countries begin streaming students at age ten (Germany) while others
delay it until sixteen (Peru); this could be playfully fed into your clown
act. Shape the whole thing into a three-minute extract, set to the music
of ‘ March of the Gladiators’ by Julius Fucik, a well-known piece that often
accompanies clown routines. Incorporate and adapt clown tricks such as
pulling statistics out of a hat, being tripped up constantly, taking a kick in
the pants and so on. While this will be an upbeat, high-energy
performance don’t forget the purpose is to communicate facts to an
audience in a comic and ironic way.

FRAGMENT 3 SKY AND ANDY REMIXED

This fragment will draw directly on Scene 4C in your first Leaving School
drama, where you showed Sky’s and Andy’s arguments with their
parents, one after the other, in two minutes.
TASK
Rework that two-minute scene with two adaptations.
1. Intercut text from Sky’s scene with text from Andy’s scene so that
the two scenes cut across and against each other. Be inventive with
the soundscape and word play—at times sections might be spoken
simultaneously, at other times one following the other. The idea is to
deliberately counterpoint narrative details with the feelings of the
characters, to show the complexity and high stakes of Sky’s and
Andy’s situations.
2. Now, add the following line of text, to be said by the parent
 somewhere appropriate in each scene: ‘I am your parent, you are my
child, I know what is best for you.’
Practise this two-minute fragment.

FRAGMENT 4 WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION!

Where did the idea of school come from? What would an alien just landed
on earth make of it—young people all forcibly gathered in one place
(called school), at regular times of the day (the timetable), to do
learning (the curriculum and assessment), led by older people
(teachers)? Does education need to be this way?
In fact, schools as we know them only appeared about 150 years ago
and there have always been strong pockets of resistance to laws which
made schooling compulsory. Today there are parents who prefer to
educate their children at home, while large numbers of today’s students
cannot wait to leave school.
TASK
Consult the following two texts, written almost one hundred years apart,
about being trapped by schools and escaping from them. You are going
to create a ten-minute collage of them, spoken and sung, by blending
and counterpointing them as you switch focus from one to the other.
First, a little background on the texts.
Text 1: The Skeul Bord Man (1870)
When compulsory schooling was introduced in Australia and the United
Kingdom in the early 1870s, many working-class parents tried to dodge
as they needed their young children at home or in the workforce to help
with their big families of the time. The government responded by
appointing School Board officials to ensure children attended school,
with powers to fine and even send parents to jail. These officials became
known as the ‘Skeul Bord Men’ and were hated and ridiculed by the
parents and children they were set up to help.
 A miner called Tommy Armstrong famous as the ‘Pitman Poet’, was
always in trouble for not sending his children to school. He poked fun at
them in a music hall monologue and song, a popular entertainment style
of the day. We’ve extended his monologue in the same vein, imagining
what the School Board Man might have said back to Tommy Armstrong.

Mr and Mrs Armstrong, come out this minute—it’s no good locking

your door, I know your children are in there with you and that you’ve
got thirteen, not just the five you told us about last week.
You cannot afford another fine of seven shillings and sixpence—
that’s half a week’s wages—besides losing a day’s pay going to
court. And you know it could mean prison for you. I know you’re not
a bad man, so please Mr Armstrong:

(Chorus from the original monologue, where Tommy Armstrong is

being satirical.)
Send your bairns to school,
learn them all ye can,
Make scholarship yer faithful friend
And you’ll never see the Skeul Bord Man.

You probably aren’t bright enough to realise it but we are only trying
to help your sort of people to better yourselves. I’m a reasonable
man and I know the new State Schools aren’t perfect but open the
door Mr Armstrong and don’t threaten me like you did last time with
your bloody carving knife, dripping foot long sausage and
murderous look. So please Mr Armstrong:

Chorus
Send your bairns to school,
learn them all ye can,
Make scholarship yer faithful friend
And you’ll never see the Skeul Bord Man.
 So one last chance. I’ll make you an offer. If we get 90 per cent
attendance for a whole week, then the whole school gets a half-
holiday! How about that? You don’t want everybody else to suffer
because of your children, do you? Well, do you? Yes, obviously you
do. So please everyone:

Chorus
Send your bairns to school,
teach them all ye can,
Make scholarship yer faithful friend
And you’ll never see the Skeul Bord Man.
Text 2: Another Brick in the Wall (1979)
‘Education’ is the name of one of three songs under the title of ‘ Another
Brick in the Wall’ from Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera, The Wall. The song
protests against rigid schooling in general and boarding schools in
particular, and was banned in some countries when it was released,
although Rolling Stone magazine in 2007 included it in their 500 greatest
songs of all time. Find the music and lyrics for ‘ Another Brick in the Wall’.
Analyse the way the lyrics and melody in ‘Education’—the tone, pace and
rhythms of both, and the way they are sung—work powerfully together
to make the singers’ feelings about schools unmistakeable.
MANAGEMENT
Produce this fragment by breaking into two groups, A and B. A will
prepare a presentation of Skeul Bord Man playing School Board officials.
B, playing school students, will present Pink Floyd’s ‘ Another Brick in the
Wall’. Both groups will need music with a rhythmic movement pattern
that everyone can stick to.
A: find a piece of suitable music for the chorus (you could make up a
jaunty tune), and B use the music from the original rock opera.
A: divide the text from Skeul Bord Man above into sections while B
creates the same number of sections by breaking up the lyrics of ‘
Another Brick in the Wall’. Create these presentations playfully with
everyone from each group joining in to sing their chorus.
Now bring both groups together and present both numbers
simultaneously, shifting the focus from one to the other by raising the
volume of one as you lower the volume of the other. You could build this
fragment into a set of passionate exchanges between these two anti-
school education messages.
It is worth bearing in mind that rejecting all school education might not
be a particularly clever thing to do. Perhaps the evil Skeul Bord Man was
right after all and the lyrics from the rock opera might do more harm than
good? Discuss this in your groups, and see if you can convey the
complexity of the question in your presentation.

Producing the Reimagined Leaving School Drama

1. Break into groups of about 4 to 6 and create one of these four
fragments. So long as all four are covered, it doesn’t matter how
many groups work on each particular fragment.
2. Once you have rehearsed and polished your fragment, play them all
for the whole class. Film them all as you go to create a visual record,
and to help guide your choice of fragments in Step 4. (Fragment 1
will not need filming as it is already a multimedia recording.) These
four fragments will be used to make your new Leaving School drama.
3. Return to your groups and discuss the following questions:
Which versions of which fragments were most interesting to
watch?
Which was the strongest moment of all the fragments?
Did the fragments speak to each other? Could you see any
obvious points of connection between them? Did the mood of
one fragment contradict or reinforce the mood of another?
Review the videos of all the fragments—what do you see
differently now?
4. Begin to assemble your preferred fragments to create your drama.
As your decisions become clear, list the fragments in the way you
will combine them. Remember that one fragment does not need to
 neatly follow another. Indeed you might play two fragments at the
same time, or even slice and dice to insert a smaller phrase of text,
action or multimedia to disrupt another fragment. When you have
settled on your combination so that it creates a ten-minute
sequence of action, set it out clearly in a document that can be
projected for the class or on a large poster.
5. Project or post your work for everyone to see and review what other
groups have done. There are likely to be some wildly varied
structures on the wall, so take a few minutes on each poster and
discuss what is similar (and what is not) to your group’s structure;
what appeals and what does not.
6. Come together as the whole class and decide which two of the
structures outlined on the posters you would like to prepare for
performance. There is likely to be some robust discussion about this
selection and a vote may be needed but you will now have two
separate plays, or versions, to perform, A and B.
7. Now re-form into two groups, A and B. Group A will take Leaving
School Reimagined drama A and Group B will take Leaving School
Reimagined drama B. Rehearse them for performance. Allow this
rehearsal process a generous amount of time, for there are likely to
be some complicated moves as fragments join up, replay, sync with
video and collide with each other.
8. Perform these two ten-minute pieces of contemporary theatre to the
other half of your class, and to any other groups who have not been
part of your process and may have interesting observations to
make.

Managing the Elements in Contemporary

Theatre
Clearly, these two performances do not follow a neatly prescribed story,
with action following logically from one scene to the next. Instead, different
principles of assembly are at work.
 The first of these is the use of fragment. Four very different fragments
were proposed; the first a multimedia mash-up, the second factual data
performed as a clown routine, the third adapted from our earlier Leaving
School drama and a fourth that added historical perspectives to the theme.
Fragments stand alone. That way, when they are juxtaposed as you did in
your ten-minute pieces, they frequently take on unexpected, unintended
and surprising meanings for an audience.
The next principle is that fragments can be arranged into a non-linear
narrative. As fragments are created separately and then assembled there
is little opportunity to link them serially, even if you wanted to. You cannot
make them follow the arc of a traditional narrative, driven by clearly
defined characters and ongoing tensions. In these plays, any narrative that
is built is also frequently disrupted. So the narrative fragment from our first
Leaving School drama (‘Sky and Andy remixed’) is chopped up so that
other important aspects of the issue, which may be factual or historical or
ironic, can come to the foreground.
The enthusiasm of many contemporary theatre makers for taking
material from all sorts of places is the principle of appropriation, which
takes ideas, images, texts (in fact any content, from anywhere—history,
statistics, artworks, popular culture) and weaves them into a new work.
When artists appropriate skilfully, they copy existing materials and
combine them to create curious, sometimes puzzling but hopefully fresh
effects. All four of your fragments appropriated material of one kind or
another: films, PISA surveys, rock opera, a traditional folk song, a scene
from your first Leaving School drama were all fair game for use. You need
to be aware that this can raise legal issues around copyright as well as
ethical issues of ownership, so be aware of when you might need to ask
permission for a particular piece.
The final principle at work here, intertextuality, extends the notion of
appropriation. When we appropriate materials for use, we cannot control
how others will receive them. We all make our own associations with the
words, songs, images and objects presented in a performance and this
becomes part of the meaning of the work for each one of us. As an
example: if, in one of these fragments, you had included this text:
… the whining school-boy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
 Unwillingly to school
some in the audience might think it a curious description, while others
would recognise it as an ‘old’ quote from … Shakespeare? Others still
would know it as part of Shakespeare’s famous ‘Seven Ages of Man’
speech from As You Like It which we met in Chapter 6. Perhaps they may
then understand, possibly as a feeling rather than a fully formed thought,
that education is one key phase in life’s journey, an old and wise idea that
has been around since at least 1599 when As You Like It was written.
Intertextuality then is the deliberate technique of including references to
other materials and texts. The work gains an added richness and depth as
imported texts open up unanticipated personal meanings for each
audience member.
Using these four principles to underpin the way you shape dramatic
action will place you alongside many contemporary theatre makers, here
in Australia and around the world. You can discover rich examples of this
approach in the book Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of
Australian Performance Art Texts by Richard Allen and Karen Pearlman
(1999). By embracing these ideas and practices you will be entering a live
debate too, about the very nature and purpose of theatre in contemporary
Australian society. For instance, does this approach mark a radical break
with past practices in drama and theatre, or is it only the latest instance of
playwrights and theatre makers doing what they have always done—
reinventing theatre, to reveal ‘the very age and body of the time’? (
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2).

Reflection
These last dramas were designed to show that, while all the elements of
drama are present, the skeleton is dancing a very different kind of dance.
Let’s consider some of those differences:
No fragment depended on first building a human context. For
instance, it was the element of movement, a high-energy clown scene,
which provided the impetus for Fragment 2. What element(s) provided
inspiration for the other fragments?
Tension did not build in measured and linear ways from one scene to
the next, so what gave each fragment its own tension?
How did focus and framing operate in each fragment? Across
 fragments?
How did you use space, time and tempo to create mood?
Is it possible to trace any narrative arc across this piece of
contemporary theatre?
What different kinds of language and what registers were
incorporated into this piece? What opportunities for meaning making
did this generate?
What different moods were created in each fragment, and how?
Did anything of symbolic value build in each fragment or across the
piece? How might that be done?
Finally, what new meanings about the theme of leaving school have
emerged in this work? How different, if at all, are they from the meanings
generated in the initial Leaving School drama?
chapter 13
playmaking
Now you have the bones of drama. You have already been making the
skeleton dance, and you are quite ready to start making your own
dramatic creations, flesh and blood and all. This chapter shows you how
you can manage the elements of drama to build plays for performance to
audiences. We look at two pathways towards creating powerful and
entertaining group-devised theatre:
Pathway 1: building an original play from scratch using the ideas and
participation of the whole group.
Pathway 2: developing and adapting improvisations and process
dramas into public performance.
Both pathways will lead to traditionally structured plays, as demonstrated
in the first eleven chapters. You can then make your own adaptations to
open up the drama as illustrated in Chapter 12.
You have of course realised by now there are significant differences
between process drama and plays. In a process drama all the participants
are making the drama by the moment; the drama is changing and
developing spontaneously, and it is self-sufficient to the group. Outsiders
will have little idea of its power or even what is going on. In a play, you
are performing something for other people, so you must know in advance
what it is you are showing. It needs to be repeatable, and therefore
rehearsed and usually at least partly scripted. For the audience to
understand and enjoy it, what it means must be visible and watchable. All
members of the audience must be able to see and interpret the characters,
the place, movement and symbols; follow the narrative, hear the
language, feel the tension and mood.

The Elements of Theatre

These differences separate out into a new set of elements for theatre, each
of which is usually provided by specialised people. In group-devised
theatre, however, management of the various elements can still be shared
by the participants, as we shall see in this chapter.
Creating the play is playwriting, and the specialist who does this is a
playwright. The verb, like the noun, is sometimes spelled
‘playwrighting’—from wright, meaning a craftsperson who works to
make something (think of shipwright).
Participants can no longer just concentrate on what their character
and the other characters are doing: they have to be aware of the
audience too, and act together (i.e. as actors) to make the audience
see, hear and interpret their characters and the action.
A director manages the dramatic action so that the audience can
follow what is happening by directing what the actors are doing and
saying.
A designer (in fact there may be several separate artists here: set
designer, costume designer, lighting designer, sound designer) ensures
that the audience sees and hears everything as effectively, and as
interestingly, as possible. A stage manager and set builders put the
designer’s vision into material form.
If the play is being staged in public, in a theatre, publicists and
marketers make sure the audience knows about it; the box office
provides tickets, and front-of-house staff look after the audience when
they arrive.
The producer and/or production manager provides an overall eye to
make sure that all these jobs are done so the complete production can
take place.
Learning to manage these elements as professionals would be the subject
for another book. Here, we are going to concentrate on what the
playwright and the actors do in creating the play. Even in the professional
theatre, this is often done by a participant group or ensemble like
yourselves.

Pre-texts and Starting Points

Where to find ideas and topics to explore? At first, no ideas that seem
sufficiently dramatic may spring to mind, or perhaps too many do. Don’t
worry, there are millions of plays out there waiting for the right
combination of skills and commitment to make them happen, and a way of
making it all manageable.
The first step is to find the initial stimulus that in process drama we call
the pre-text, as we saw in Chapter 6. This needs to be something that you
and your group find interesting, and that poses some intriguing questions.
The pre-text may suggest a timeframe: present, past or future. It might be a
single item such as a theme from a novel, an artwork, a historical fact or a
myth, a computer game, a video clip, a map, a poem or a news article, or
it may be a combination of any of these. Pre-texts can be made up of
multiple items, such as the contents of a suitcase or an attic. The pre-text
could also be a more general theme or social issue that raises questions
for you.

ACTIVITY 1 GENERATING POSSIBLE PRE-TEXTS

Think back to the four process dramas we devised in this book. What
were the pre-texts?
Spend a few minutes finding and agreeing on a few pre-texts that
interest you, and that you think would make good dramas. What would
you choose as the theme to explore each of these?
Do any of them immediately suggest a possibility for dramatic action?
Pre-texts usually suggest people (often a group of people) with difficult
tasks, problems, dilemmas and clashing goals—think of the key
tensions in Chapter 2.

In choosing a pre-text, keep in mind that this material is a starting point

only. If the pre-text is a book or film, say, you don’t have to use the whole
story—greater dramatic tension can be generated if you use just a
fragment of it. Likewise, a map that is torn or has been marked in some
way is more interesting as a pre-text for a play than a map that is perfectly
intact.

Pathway 1: Devising a Play from Scratch

You can make a play directly from a pre-text. We will start by showing a
practical way in which a large group or class can devise a play, or a
number of plays, from scratch, using the expertise and skill of your whole
group and many of the process drama techniques you learned in this
book. This strategy for getting the creative juices flowing in a really
practical way we call the Headlines technique. It starts with something
superficially ‘dramatic’, attention-grabbing and even sensational, and then
works back to flesh that out and find depth and authenticity.
Don’t be tempted to start by going for comedy—take it seriously. Your
play may end up very funny, but you don’t yet have anything to be funny
about, and real humour is always based on something substantial, serious
or even tragic, You can’t sustain a performance or an audience’s interest
with just a set of gags or a silly situation.

ACTIVITY 2 CREATING A PLAY FROM A HEADLINE

STEP 1: FINDING A THEME
Get into groups of about six and decide on a pre-text or theme or topic
that the group is interested in. This should have something to do with
human behaviour, and there should be questions, problems and issues
involved. The decision is often better made with speed—say give the
group one minute only, or two or three at most, or you can quickly get
bogged down. Don’t worry about picking the ‘perfect’ topic; this is just the
starting point.
Go round the groups sharing your ideas. You may decide to continue
with the idea you came up with, or choose one that the whole group can
relate to. The Headlines strategy can be used to generate a different play
for each group, or a single play for the whole class.
All groups follow these steps, whether you are all working on the same
starting topic, or on separate ones.
STEP 2: A DRAMATIC INCIDENT
Each group appoints a narrator/scribe, someone who is good at taking
quick notes, and who can make spoken announcements clearly.
Together, in no more than two minutes, come up with a key incident,
something that:
happens to particular people
encapsulates one of the issues that is problematic about the theme
is newsworthy.
Note that it does not have to be from public life to be newsworthy—a
domestic incident in a family, or an issue that arises in a school, can also
get into the news. You just need a bare sketch of the incident, what
happens. This is not the time for backgrounding; keep details to an
absolute minimum.
The group now has three tasks:
Write the first paragraph of a news report about the incident, in the
style of a popular news channel or tabloid newspaper. About three
sentences is probably enough.
Find a juicy headline that encapsulates the incident’s significance.
Prepare a ‘news photo’ (a group frozen image) of a particularly
spectacular or problematic moment in the incident that illustrates
the issue. This photograph can include the entire group except for
the narrator/scribe. Make it vivid, but not too gymnastically
challenging, as the image has to be held for a long time.
This whole exercise should not take you more than fifteen minutes.
STEP 3: QUESTIONS, NOT ANSWERS
We are now going to focus on one group at a time. You will each get the
opportunity to present your incident, but in this step, the audience is
more important than the performers, and all the other groups are going
to help add clarity and depth to your basic picture.
First, read all the directions here carefully before proceeding.
Decide which group will present first. This group, get into position for
your ‘news photo’. Other groups, arrange yourselves as an audience
where you can see and hear. Actors, you must be prepared to hold your
‘photo’ pose while the narrator reads the headline and paragraph … and
longer!
While the image is still frozen the audience is to ask whatever
questions this incident raises for them. Start by asking for simple
narrative details: ‘Who is that person?’ ‘What is she doing?’ etc. Then try
digging deeper: ‘When they go home tonight, what will they tell their
family?’; ‘Why was the child left by herself?’ etc. The teacher may lead
the questioning in order to model this probing for depth. The scribe needs
time to write the questions down. (Again, the teacher may help
paraphrase questions for speedier recording.)
NOTE: at no time must the scribe or actors try to answer any of the
spectators’ questions, even if you think you have the answer. Audience
questions have the capacity to open up more fruitful possibilities than
the group’s original scenario, and this process can be squelched if you
step in with ready-made answers.
If necessary, repeat the reading and freeze ‘photo’. If the recording of
questions takes a long time, the group should step out of the pose, relax
and shake out for a moment, before resuming the pose, maybe more
than once. It’s important not to cut or shorten the process, or you will end
up short-changing the group.
When each group has gone through this process, all will end up with
their scribe’s list of questions about their particular incident. These
questions are the beginning of your real playmaking process, where we
start to dig for the truth under the sensationalism of the news story.
STEP 4: PRELIMINARY FOCUSING
As a group, identify a single question from your list (or perhaps two or
three that are linked), which:
 cannot be answered simply
interests you all
is clearly problematic
is worth investigating further to shed new light on the theme or
topic.
As you seek to identify your question, think about possible dramatic
tensions that could arise in exploring it—the more the better. Might there
be dilemmas? Will there be urgent goals at stake for somebody, or
everybody? Is there likely to be (or is there already) conflict? Is there
some mystery or secrecy involved?
Next, identify a particular character who will be central to this
question; indeed, the question cannot be answered without knowing
more about that character. It is likely to be someone in the frozen image,
but it doesn’t have to be. This person is the protagonist—the lead
character, who will be at the centre of the action.
If you are all working towards a single whole-class play, rather than
separate plays for each group, this is the step where you have to make
difficult choices about the most interesting question(s), situation, plot
line and tensions. These all have to be agreed on, and some groups are
going to have to make concessions, even give up what they have been
working on if it is incompatible with what the majority feels is the most
productive line of enquiry. This can be uncomfortable, and is sometimes
one of the toughest decisions in drama. Of course, it may all just fall into
place—good luck.
The next two steps (5 and 6) may be done in either order, depending
on your group’s purpose in developing this play.
STEP 5: BACKGROUNDING THE PROTAGONIST
As a group, start to background your protagonist very thoroughly. Avoid
taking up judgemental positions and try to create an authentic and
consistent character with a believable history, rather than a cardboard
stereotype. Think about the person’s attitudes that might be relevant to
the question you are exploring.
 As soon as you think you are ready, it’s time to hot-seat each other:
take turns role-playing the protagonist while the others fire questions at
you. This way you will quickly find gaps in the character’s background.
When you have your protagonist’s character reasonably well
developed, suspend the group work, and do a round-robin where a
volunteer, A, from each group is hot-seated by another group. A must
stay in-role, and answer all questions (even if you are making new
answers up as you go along—just stay consistent, and remember your
additions). This exercise is always interesting and revealing, whether all
groups are working on different versions of the same protagonist,
different protagonists from the same scenario, or protagonists from
entirely different scenarios.
After about ten minutes of hot-seating, A will return to their group and
share whatever new material they came up with under the crossfire.
Work together in your group to iron out any inconsistencies and you will
have created a rich, rounded and believable character, around whom you
can build scenes and a storyline.
STEP 6: CREATING A NARRATIVE
Go back to the key incident in the news photo, and consider some of the
questions the audience asked at that time which interested you.
Thinking about cause and effect, identify what might have happened
earlier in that dramatic context, to at least partly cause or lead to the key
incident. Jumping forward in time, what might be an important effect of
the key incident?
You need to create a chain of cause and effect that suggests other
incidents—and therefore potential scenes—not too many, just a few
really significant moments or turning points. Some before, some after
the key incident, each depicting a vital moment in that chain of cause
and effect.
Now take one of those vital moments at a time, and improvise a scene
around it. Don’t just discuss the scene, or script it: you need to try it out
in three-dimensional action. You will always learn more from doing it than
 just talking about it.
You could set it up as a role-play, or you might prefer to discuss it first
and put it together as a planned improvisation, or even use a theatrical
device like the alter ego, where actors enact a scene while other actors
stand behind them revealing the subtext of what each is actually
thinking.
Incidentally, it often happens that the original key incident becomes
sidelined or is even forgotten as you pursue your lines of enquiry into
cause and effect, and new priorities and characters emerge. This is
perfectly normal—you have simply left behind what was after all just the
sketchiest of starts.
STEP 7: DEVELOPING A SCENARIO
Now work out what other scenes would be essential for an audience to
make sense of the story and convey your point of view, and interesting
for them as well. Look carefully at the most active and visual way of
depicting the dramatic action. This involves looking for moments where
physical action might be more powerful than words.
Next, consider the arc of narrative. Arrange your scenes in such a way
that they fit onto that arc (see the figure). Do earlier scenes provide
enough exposition for the audience to understand the context of later
ones? And which scene will be your crisis point? Create a scenario of
scenes or segments and their running order.
Do this carefully and you will have the bones of a play to perform.
Working together, trusting your dramatic instincts, you will put the
material together in the most powerful way.

From devising to performance

With all the drama you have done in this book, and all the films and other
drama you have seen, you will realise that the best plays are rarely
entirely naturalistic. Film and television, with the resources of mobile
cameras and location shooting, 3D, curved screens and special effects
directors, can create astonishing settings to make them look entirely natural
and help us forget where we are. That’s the magic of cinema. Neither a
theatre stage nor a studio or classroom allows us that luxury.
The magic of theatre is quite different. We have instead all the stylistic
techniques we have been exploring in this book—frozen images, time
jumps, symbolic dance to name a few … and just think, for instance, of
how useful and powerful a mask is. You’ve seen the conventions and tricks
of theatre at work both in our process dramas and in our play text extracts,
very few of which were entirely naturalistic. So, in planning your
performance consider non-naturalistic styles that may bring out the best in
a scene.

ACTIVITY 3 STYLISATION
Identify the scenes in your scenario that are non-naturalistic already, or
have non-naturalistic components. Taking one scene at a time,
brainstorm theatrical conventions you might use instead of the way you
originally played them. Be as imaginative as you can; once you have a
workable idea, you can fit your imagination to what you want the play to
achieve.

‘Natural’ dialogue and action

Although we are encouraging you to explore stylisation, it’s likely you will
also want some scenes representing real-life behaviour ( naturalism). You
will therefore need to know how to turn dialogue into script.
Even if you have recorded the dialogue of your intensely realistic and
powerful improvisation, you can’t just transcribe it (put it in writing) and
leave it at that; it will be usable only as a prompt for your memory. The
same is true of a real-life interview or conversation. You can’t just make a
facsimile of spoken language and then re-enact it as script—at least, not
without totally boring and confusing your audience. Unfortunately,
naturalistic and natural are not the same thing! Two opposing forces are at
work:
In real life, when people are talking they leave out lots of background
stuff—the things that don’t need to be spoken because the people they
are talking to already know it. We know our relationships; we have
expectations of each other’s attitudes and can read their mood. We
 talk in shorthand. An audience meeting these people for the first time
doesn’t know any of this, and some of it may need to be revealed for
their understanding of the drama. At the same time, spoken language
is always padded out with digressions, false starts, exclamations and
side comments, reiterations and the redundant phrases of speech
flow: ‘what do you think?’—‘like’—‘… I mean …’
On the stage, spoken dialogue needs to be both economical (no
padding or digressions) and as tightly focused as possible, or the
audience’s attention—and the tension—will quickly droop. Yet
dialogue must also convey important information about the
characters’ relationship and history that the audience does not know.
The need to balance these two opposing demands sets up a powerful
challenge for budding playwrights:
On the one hand, the audience must be given the necessary
background context (including emotional information), and sufficient
of the storyline and the backstory of the characters’ relationship.
On the other hand, nothing is more boring, flat or annoying than
having actors reeling off stuff they would never say in real life, merely
to fill the audience in.
We met the popular contemporary genre of verbatim theatre in Chapter 8,
where it gave a powerfully emotional integrity to the stories of the
descendants of the Myall Creek massacre.
You might decide to use this in your own play-building. Verbatim theatre
is usually comprised entirely of real-life speech and conversations. It is
commonly derived from interviews about some real event, presenting the
memories and opinions of those involved. All the points we have just made
above apply equally to this kind of show. A good piece of verbatim
theatre is very carefully crafted, with a great deal of editing and
rearranging of the original text. When you see or read a piece of verbatim
theatre, look and listen closely to see if you can see the playwright’s hand
in recreating the dialogue. You would need to use that skill yourself in
crafting your own verbatim theatre.

ACTIVITY 4 INTRODUCING SUBTEXT

 This is where you can start exploring subtext. You take the bones of the
scene and even the original dialogue, then decide what the audience
does NOT need to be told but can gather by other means, such as what
can be indirectly hinted at, or better still, what can be implied by a
meaningful glance or a meaningful silence, or some physical action.
Look back at Activity 6 in Chapter 7, and workshop one or more of your
own scenes following the steps of that exercise. Finding the right words
for a vital moment, replacing words with action and gestures, and
including a meaningful moment of silence, are all ways of making
interesting ‘natural’ dialogue.

Design and technical effects

When working in process drama, apart from working out how to use the
space for your scenes, you probably didn’t have much opportunity to
make use of design and technical effects, especially scenery and
costumes. If you are on a stage you should have some capacity to bring in
lights and sound and scenery. Carefully used, they will all be effective.
From the start, or at least from this point, you should be thinking about the
design—what your play is going to look like. The design can hold and
sustain the mood, support the characters and the action, and carry a great
deal of the meaning.
From the beginning there will be practical considerations: the space
available, your budget, the technical capabilities of the space and your
skills.

ACTIVITY 5 INTRODUCING THEATRE DESIGN

Work out how design and technical effects can enrich your scenario. In
your groups consider the following questions. Look at each scene in turn
and also consider the play as a whole.
Design and staging
What are the dimensions of your performing space and where would you
like to put the audience? Why? What design would be practical and make
 best use of the space for your play?
Costume
Will you use costumes? Will you need a fully realised costume for each
character or could a single item of clothing suggest your character and
the setting?
Lighting (LFX)
Will your play be staged in daylight or in the dark? If you have the means
to use blackouts and artificial lights, when will you use them? Start by
identifying moments within your play when a change of lighting will
intensify the focus of that moment.
Sound (SFX)
What sound effects are essential for your play (e.g. a gunshot)? How
might sounds be used unobtrusively to heighten atmosphere (e.g.
birdsong at dawn)? How might incidental music be used to assist in
transitions between scenes and create an appropriate mood for a
scene?
Multimedia
Could projected images, still or moving, assist the theatricality and
impact of the play?

A warning: technical effects are rarely essential, and in this realm, as in

dialogue, ‘less is usually more’. It is easy to become beguiled by the
exciting possibilities of background sound or lighting effects, but they have
three potential drawbacks.
They will be quite time-consuming, even if you have good equipment:
designing lighting and sound plots; plotting and patching or recording
and timing; and training someone willing and capable to operate the
equipment accurately.
They are more likely to distract you as actors than help you, because
they give you even more things to worry about—finding your light,
listening for the sound cues, navigating the set.
They are also likely to distract the audience if they are not operated
 skilfully.
That said, contemporary developments in technology, such as virtual
reality and design software, provide exciting opportunities for theatre
making.

Performing
When you are preparing the performance, we do not recommend too
much formal blocking, that is, pre-planning the actors’ moves on stage. Too
much blocking can block you; it can destroy the spontaneity as the actors
try desperately to remember their lines and exactly where they have to
stand. This is a particular danger if you are working from your improvised
scenes. Block the vital moments, by all means; this will help to remind you
how important it is to focus the action for the audience. Beyond that, just
remember that it is each actor’s responsibility to ensure that anything they
have to do and say can be seen and heard; it is everyone else’s
responsibility to ensure that this is all that is seen and heard at that
moment. Practise in rehearsal the idea that ‘acting is reacting’: that when
somebody is speaking or doing something in focus, everybody else does
not stop—they are engaged in that moment too, even if they are on the
other side of the stage.

Pathway 2: Turning a Process Drama into a

Play
Often the most exciting drama is made just by a group of people stepping
into an imaginary world and improvising from there, for their own
enjoyment and new discoveries. We hope you have found some of that
excitement and pleasure in the process dramas in this book. However, if it
has been a really interesting drama, you will probably want to share it
with others—to turn it into theatre.
Starting with an existing process drama is often much easier than trying
to generate a play from scratch. For one thing, you have already got the
basic materials—theme, story, characters and probably some powerful
scenes.

From role-play to acting

You will have noticed in your process drama the difference between ‘being
in-role’—identifying with a character in the moment—and times when you
were sharing, or presenting some of those moments as scenes or frozen
images. Because you now had an audience (even if only of other
classmates), for them to understand what your scene was about you had to
move from the spontaneous to the planned, from feeling the character’s
emotions to depicting them for others. You may still have been
experiencing some of the feelings, but you had to control and show them
to the audience, through what you said and how you gestured. This is
what you have to do on a larger scale to turn a process drama into a play.
You will also have to introduce new material, to help the audience who do
not have your background knowledge.
So, you will have to make a major jump in your thinking. From now on,
you will always consider the audience first—it’s no longer about just what
interested you in the drama, but what they need to see, that will interest
them. You’ll find some activities or scenes that you really enjoyed just won’t
work on the stage. The market scene (Scene 1) in the Refugee Family
drama for instance, with its three successive gossip mill activities, would be
quite incomprehensible to an audience … at least in its present form.

Getting a basic shape

In the first place, therefore, we will concentrate on theatrical moments from
your drama that will work for an audience, that can be rehearsed and at
least semi-scripted, so that a clear and focused story can emerge. Keeping
the structure simple, you are going to put together a coherent version of
the story, including those theatrical moments.
We recommend that you structure your play around a narrator—a
storyteller—that you will use to introduce the play, and continue to use for
continuity. This gives you a simple but dramatic way of making transitions
between scenes and building a coherent picture for the audience. It will be
stronger if the narrator can speak in the first person, as one of the
characters.

ACTIVITY 6 STRUCTURING THE PERFORMANCES

In groups, revisit either the Drugs in Sport drama or the Refugee Family
drama and discuss the following questions. This will lay the groundwork
to help your transition from process drama to theatre.
Who might be the narrator?
Who would be in a good position to know everything that is going on and
at the same time add appeal to the story? Can the audience trust that
narrator? What do we want the audience to know about this story and
these people, and what point of view do we want to give them?
What material have you got already?
What did you create in the process drama that you could use as the basis
for a performance? Arrange sections you choose in a series of scenes,
each of which will show the audience something about the story and the
characters. If you decide to make a play out of the Refugee Family drama
you will immediately see that some of the scenes already involve a kind
of performance—the ‘Separation’ newsreel clip in Scene 3 and ‘ Tuan’s
Real Story’ in Scene 4.
What additional material do you need?
Additional scenes will most likely be essential for an audience to make
sense of the story, and for you to communicate your point of view while
also providing interest for them. Look carefully for the most active and
visual ways of depicting the action—and this involves thinking about
where an action might be better and more powerful than words.
What is your arc of narrative?
Can you arrange all your scenes, old and new, in such a way that they fit
onto a narrative arc? Chapter 6 shows an arc for the Refugee Family
drama (see here)—but as a process drama. You will certainly have to
make some adjustments to make your proposed play fit.
What is your running order?
Finalise your scenario and the running order of scenes. All these scenes
need careful putting together and rehearsal, whether or not they are all
fully scripted.
Work together, trusting your dramatic instincts to assemble the material in
the most powerful way, and you will have a play to perform. You are now
ready to move from devising to performance. Go back to here and follow
the directions from there.
conclusion
We have demonstrated in this book that understanding the elements of
drama is essential to managing them in order to create your own drama
and plays. Whether you took Pathway 1 or Pathway 2 in Chapter 13 to
reach your performance, if you were using all the basic elements of drama
powerfully and effectively, you will already have:
strong characters, that as actors you understand and empathise with
deeply felt scenes, with the basics of powerful action and dialogue
a strong storyline, with plenty of tension to hold the audience
a style that includes a range of theatrical conventions.
You have a powerful human story that you are telling, along with a vision
of what is important in that story: its messages, and what you have
discovered about human nature in this dramatic context. This is being
Dramawise.
The usefulness of the elements of drama does not stop there. They can
be used for understanding all forms of drama everywhere and analysing
how they work. Consider also the elements of drama as a checklist to
support and improve your play or process drama. This is particularly
valuable if something is not working well, which can often happen,
especially in your early attempts at working in these forms. If you get stuck,
stop and have a group discussion. Refer to the checklist of elements below
to see which might need more creative treatment.
Are the situation and characters believable, rich and rounded enough
to carry the whole play? You might need to flesh out some of these
basics, to build belief in the human context.
Is there a strong enough tension to sustain the interest till the end?
Look for other forms of tension to bring in, that go beyond the obvious
and the melodramatic.
Focus must be sustained as the action develops. Be alert for ways of
keeping focus, for instance, by reframing scenes.
Place and space need close attention by both directors and
playwrights. In setting up a scene, did you think about what the
characters needed to fit the fictional location? Does the location
 highlight or give any added power to the action? The audience see
before they hear, and need to be able to believe what they see.
Is the language believable? Make sure characters are speaking in
appropriate registers, and the dialogue is strong and economical.
Go through the remaining elements and finish this checklist, noting the key
points you learned as you worked through this book. When you have
finished, you will have a valuable resource. That is because this exercise
will increase the richness of your drama, and therefore everyone’s
enjoyment of it.
Finally, it is a valuable way of reinforcing your learning in both making
and responding to all drama everywhere … of making you really
Dramawise!
references
BOOKS
Allen, R. & Pearlman, K. (1999). Performing the Unnameable: An
Anthology of Australian Performance Art Texts, Currency Press, Sydney.
Armstrong, T. (1870). The Skeul Bord Man, the Tommy Armstrong Society,
www.pitmanpoet.org.uk. Accessed 19 February 2017.
Čapek, J. & Čapek, K. (1921). The Insect Play, in Čapek Four Plays,
translated by Cathy Porter and Peter Majer, Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama, Act 3. Copyright © Josef and Karel Čapek. Extract reprinted
courtesy of Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc.
Commonwealth of Australia (1929). Transcript of the findings of the
‘Board of Enquiry concerning the killing of natives in Central Australia
by Police Parties and others, and concerning other matters.’ National
Archives, 18 January 1929.
Di Cesare, E., Eldridge, S. & McGarry, T. (2007). Hitler’s Daughter
(adapted from the novel by Jackie French), Currency Press, Sydney, pp.
17, 19-21, 40-41. Copyright © Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge, Tim
McGarry and Jackie French. Extract reprinted courtesy of Currency
Press.
Kronk, R. (2009). Snagged, Playlab, Brisbane, p. 33. Copyright © Robert
Kronk. Extract reprinted by permission of Playlab.
Littlewood, J. (1967). Oh, What a Lovely War!, Methuen Drama, Act 3.
Copyright © Joan Littlewood. Extract reprinted by permission of Sayle
Literary Agency.
Lyall-Watson, K. (2013). Motherland, Playlab, Brisbane. Copyright ©
Katherine Lyall-Watson. Extract reprinted by permission of Playlab.
Morris, M. (1993). Two Weeks with the Queen (adapted from the novel
by Morris Gleitzman), Currency Press, Sydney, pp. 1-2. Copyright ©
Mary Morris and Morris Gleitzman. Extract reprinted courtesy of
Currency Press.
OECD (2011) ‘The Impact of the 1999 Education Reform in Poland’:
OECD Education Working Papers. No. 49. OECD Publishing.
O’Toole, J & Dunn, J. (2013). Pretending to Learn: Teaching Drama in the
Primary and Middle Years, DramaWeb Publishing, Brisbane. Available
at www.pretendingtolearn.word.press.com, accessed 10 January
2016.
Rankin, S. (2012). Namatjira (written for the Namatjira family and
published in a double volume with Ngapartji Ngapartji), Currency
Press, Sydney, pp. 40-42. Copyright © Scott Rankin. Extract reprinted
courtesy of Currency Press.
Shakespeare, W (1597). Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 Scene 4.
Shakespeare, W (1623). King John, Act 3 Scene 3.
Shakespeare, W (1623). As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 7.
Shakespeare, W (1623). Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2 Scene 2.
Sherman, J. (2003). Hu’s On First. Copyright © James Sherman. Extract
reprinted courtesy of James Sherman
Thompson, P. and Campbell R. (1975). The Children’s Crusade, Samuel
French, London, pp. 12-13. Copyright © Paul Thompson and Robert
Campbell. Extract reprinted by permission of Alan Brodie
Representation Ltd.
Van Tranh, T. and Edgar, G. (2006). The Drifting Clouds. Brisbane: Self-
published.
Wagner, B-J. (1976). Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium.
Washington DC: National Education Association.
Wilkinson, L. (2014). Today We’re Alive, Playlab, Brisbane, pp. 18-19.
Copyright © Linden Wilkinson. Extract reprinted by permission of
Playlab.

IMAGES
Rebours, L. (2004). Lance Armstrong, photograph, Associated Press.
Anh Tuan, TK (1991). Farewell Saigon, painting (photographed by John
O’Toole).
Labbe, J.C. (1975). The Fall of Saigon, Vietnam in April, 1975-,
photograph, Getty Images.
Joseph, M. (year unknown). Reproduced in Australia’s Aboriginal
Children. (1977). The Aboriginal Children’s History of Australia.
Adelaide: Rigby Limited.
Haseman, B. (2016). Myall Creek Massacre Memorial, photographs.

FILM
Heathcote, D. (1971). Three Looms Waiting. (Film, director Richard Eyre).
London: BBC Films.
acknowledgements
The authors would like to show their grateful appreciation to what is now
generations of teachers and students who have trusted and used
Dramawise for thirty years, and in turn given us valuable feedback, further
inspiration and many ideas for this reimagining. A special thank you to
Sue Davis, for her 21st anniversary article ‘Coming of Age: Dramawise
and the Elements of Drama’(NJ Vol 31.2, Drama Australia). And thanks to
Currency Press for finding and engaging our original copy editor, Janet
Blagg, whose penetrating queries (worthy of a born drama teacher),
robust scrutiny and flawless style have enriched the book.
The authors and publishers would also like to thank the following for
permission to reproduce material in this book:
L.K. Anh Tuan for the use of his painting Farewell to Saigon, and also
for his cooperation in providing background material.
Mary Joseph, from Areyonga, and the Aboriginal Arts Board, for the
continuing use of her painting of the Coniston Massacre.
Linden Wilkinson and her witnesses, black and white, from the Myall
Creek Memorial Committee.
Julie Dunn, for her assessment checklist design from Pretending to Learn
—Teaching Drama in the Primary and Middle Years.
index
Terms marked in bold are central concepts that occur throughout and are
explained in the text on the numbered page.

A
Aboriginal Arts Board
Academic College
act, actor
Albee, Edward
Allen, Richard
alter ego
Ampol
analogy
Anh Tuan, L.K.
‘Another Brick in the Wall’
Antony and Cleopatra
apartheid
appropriation
Aristotle
Armstrong, Lance
Armstrong, Tommy
Art-er-rati
Asgard
Asian Market
assessment checklist
Australian Curriculum: Arts

B
backgrounding
backstory
Back to Back Theatre
Berchtesgaden
bikies
blocking
Brisbane
Brook, Peter
Brown, Bille

C
Čapek, Josef and Karel
cast, casting
chain of causation
Champs-Élysées
character, characterisation
climax
communism
Coniston massacre
constraints
contrasts
costume, costume designer
crisis
Crocodile Dundee
Czechoslovakia
D
Danang
Dargie, William
Dead Poets Society
design, designer
Di Cesare, Eva
Diem, General
Dien Bien Phu
documentation
dramatic action
dramatic form
dramatic situation
drug cheats
Drugs in Sport drama
Dunn, Julie

E
Eldridge, Sandra
empathy
emphasis

F
Facebook
Farewell Saigon
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Five Ws
forum theatre
fourth wall
fragment
frame, framing
France
Freemasons
French, Jackie
frozen image
Fucik, Julius

G
gesture
God of Carnage
gossip mill
Greek drama

H
Haig, Field Marshal Sir Douglas
Haiphong
Hamlet
Hanoi
headlines
headlines technique
Hitchcock, Alfred
Ho Chi Minh, General
hot-seat

I
improvisation
internet
intertextuality
intonation
irony
irony (dramatic)

J
Jamieson, Trevor
Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop
Joseph, Mary

K
Kamilaroi people
King George
Kirrawee
Kronk, Robert

L
leader-in-role
light and dark
lighting designer
Lucas, George
Lyall-Watson, Katherine

M
making
March of the Gladiators
Martin Place
mash-up
McGarry, Tim
media release
melodrama, melodramatic
micro-theatre
Miracle Plays
Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People
monologue
Morris, Mary
Moscow
motivation
Movement/stillness
music hall
Myall Creek

N
Namatjira, Albert
narrator
naturalism, naturalistic
neutral masks
non-linear narrative
North Vietnam

P
pace
parody
participatory theatre
Pearlman, Karen
performance
Performing the Unnameable
Pink Floyd
PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)
pitch
playback theatre
playtexts
playwright, playwriting
plot
postcards
Pretending to Learn
pre-text
process drama
prologue
promenade theatre
properties (props)
proscenium arch
protagonist
proxemics
Public address (PA)

R
radio play
Red Riding Hood
reflection in-role
reflection out-of-role
register
rehearsal
responding
Reza, Yazmin
Robin Hood
Rock Surfers Theatre Company
roles, role-play
Rolling Stone magazine
Roman warriors
rostra block

S
Saigon
satire
scenario
school board
school musical
school motto
serial narrative
set builder
set designer
setting
Shakespeare, William
Sherman, James,
site-specific theatre
Skeul Bord Man
Small Metal Objects
Snowy Mountains scheme
sound and silence
sound designer
sound effects
South Africa
South Vietnam
Spectrum Now festival
stagecraft
stage directions
stage manager
Star Wars
Star Wars, A New Hope
story analyst
streaming
street theatre
subplot
subtext
symmetry, asymmetry

T
teacher-in-role
technical college
text
The Empty Space
Thompson, Paul
tone, tone colour
Tour de France

U
unity handshake
US Anti-Doping Agency

V
verbatim theatre
Viet Cong
Vietnam War
volume

W
Warlpiri
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Wilkinson, Linden
Winfrey, Oprah
Winter’s Tale, The
Wirrayaraay people

Y
YouTube
about the authors
Brad Haseman and John O’Toole have been teaching, researching and
writing on drama and arts education for two lifetimes, principally in
Australia but also on all other continents, to all age groups. Both originally
secondary teachers, they have been involved—often together—in teacher
training, curriculum development, innovative pedagogy, assessment,
practice-led research and writing books. One of those, Dramawise, has
been influential in many state, National and International curricula, and
this completely rewritten and reborn successor, Dramawise Reimagined, is
their latest joint project.
COPYRIGHT DETAILS
First published in 2017
by Currency Press Pty Ltd,
PO Box 2287, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2012, Australia
enquiries@currency.com.au
www.currency.com.au
First digital edition published in 2017 by Currency Press.
Copyright Dramawise Reimagined © Brad Haseman and John O’Toole
2017.

COPYING FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES

The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or
10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be copied by any educational
institution for its educational purposes provided that that educational institution
(or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright
Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. For details of the CAL licence for
educational institutions contact CAL, 11/66 Goulburn Street, Sydney, NSW,
2000; tel: within Australia 1800 066 844 toll free; outside Australia 61 2
9394 7600; fax: 61 2 9394 7601; email: info@copyright.com.au

COPYING FOR OTHER PURPOSES

Except as permitted under the Act, for example a fair dealing for the purposes
of study, research, criticism or review, no part of this book may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means without prior written permission. All enquiries should be made to the
publisher at the address above.

Currency Press has made every effort to identify and gain the permission of the
copyright holders whose work appears in this book. Any enquiries should be
forwarded to the publisher at the above address.
ePub ISBN: 9781760621162
mobi ISBN: 9781760621179
Cover and internal design by TDSM Design Media for Currency Press.
eBook developed by IntegralDMS www.integraldms.com.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CURRENCY
PRESS
The School Drama Book: Drama, Literature and Literacy in the Creative
Classroom
Robyn Ewing and John Nicholas Saunders

School Drama is a professional learning program for primary school

teachers, which focuses on the power of using drama and literature to
improve English and literacy in young learners.

School Drama was developed by the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) in

2009, in partnership with The University of Sydney. It has been acclaimed
by Australian and international critics, and is now a cornerstone of the STC’s
Education program.

The School Drama Book is a comprehensive School Drama resource. It

includes:
A summary of how drama and literature enhance literacy
An explanation of the School Drama approach and methodology
Learning outcomes from the School Drama program so far
Exploration of the art and pedagogy of drama (via elements, devices,
and roles)
22 classroom dramas: each comprised of a series of workshops that
progress through common themes and texts.

The School Drama Book is essential reading for teachers and theatre
practitioners who want to educate confidently with drama, either through
the STC’s School Drama program or on their own. It uses drama as a critical
pedagogy, and encourages learning through activities, rather than teaching
‘about’ the texts. This approach has been shown to develop rich
imaginations and creative capacities for the future.

ISBN 978-1-92500-534-9, also available as an ebook

Drama for Early Childhood

Katherine Zachest

Drama for Early Childhood contains forty simple, easy to follow lesson plans
appropriate for children between the ages of 3-8 years old.

Including over 200 individual activities, vocal activities and character work,
as well as activities involving costume, puppet making and script work, this
book is a practical and invaluable resource for teachers and early childhood
educators wishing to provide a vibrant, innovative and engaging drama
experience.

It is written for both beginning teachers looking to incorporate some drama

into their curriculum and for experienced drama educators in need of some
extra material for lessons. It is designed to be a practical resource and to
become a teaching tool.

ISBN 978-1-92500-531-8

Namatjira / Ngapartji Ngapartji

Scott Rankin

Namatjira & Ngapartji Ngapartji go right to the heart of the intersection

between Indigenous and non-Indigenous experience. These stories of
family, friendship, land, myth, life and death are contextualised within the
social and political framework of their times. They resonate universally, yet
at the same time capture unique moments in Australian history and
experience.
Namatjira is the moving story of Albert Namatjira (1902–1959 ),
Australia’s most famous Indigenous watercolour artist and the first to
achieve commercial success, but his story is hardly known. Albert
Namatjira’s story resonates today as strongly as it did 50 years ago,
providing a lens through which we can see the relationship between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians both in the past and the
present.

Co-created with Trevor Jamieson and taking its name from the Pitjantjatjara
concept of exchange and reciprocity, Ngapartji Ngapartji is a deeply
affecting experience of Indigenous history. Exploring themes of
dispossession and displacement from country, home and family, the play
tells the story of a Pitjantjatjara family forcibly moved off their lands to
make way for the testing of British Atomic bombs at Maralinga.

ISBN 978-0-86819-922-1, also available as an ebook

Two Weeks with the Queen

Mary Morris, based on the novel by Morris Gleitzman

An adaptation of Morris Gleitzman’s hilarious yet poignant novel. When his

brother is suddenly taken seriously ill, Colin is sent from his home in
Australia to England to stay with his Aunty Iris. At first, Colin is devastated,
but then he hits on a plan: who better to help him find a doctor able to make
his brother better than the Queen?

ISBN 978-0-86819-932-0, also available as an ebook

Hitler’s Daughter: the Play

Adapted from the novel by Jackie French
Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge and Tim McGarry
Four country children waiting in the rain for the school bus take turns telling
stories. In an unusual twist, Anna’s story takes the children to Nazi
Germany. An intriguing tale about Heidi, a young girl caught in the turmoil of
World War II, whose father was one of the most dreaded men in history. One
of the children, Mark, becomes engrossed in Heidi’s story. In his
conversations with his friends, his teacher and with his parents, he
explores the moral and ethical issues it raises.

This intriguing play poses powerful questions about a frightening period in

history and forces us to examine moral issues in relation to society’s fears
and prejudices in a fresh, compelling light.

ISBN 978-0-86819-813-2, also available as an ebook