Primary English: Knowledge and Understanding - Medwell Jane A. 2014

The qualities of drama

TEACHERS’ STANDARDS

A teacher must:

3. Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge

✵ have a secure knowledge of the relevant subject(s) and curriculum areas, foster and maintain pupils’ interest in the subject, and address misunderstandings

✵ demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the subject and curriculum areas, and promote the value of scholarship

✵ demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject.

4. Plan and teach well structured lessons

✵ impart knowledge and develop understanding through effective use of lesson time

✵ promote a love of learning and children’s intellectual curiosity

✵ contribute to the design and provision of an engaging curriculum within the relevant subject area(s).

8. Fulfil wider professional responsibilities

✵ take responsibility for improving teaching through appropriate professional development.

Curriculum context

National Curriculum programmes of study

This knowledge is designed to underpin the teaching of the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 programmes of study for English, which state, for example, that pupils should be taught

in spoken language to:

✵ participate in discussions, presentations, performances, role play/improvisations and debates

in reading to:

✵ develop positive attitudes to reading, and an understanding of what they read, by:

listening to and discussing a wide range of plays Y3/4/5/6

preparing play scripts to read aloud and to perform, showing understanding through intonation, tone, volume and action Y3/4/5/6.

Early Years Foundation Stage

The Early Learning Goals specify that, by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage, children should:

✵ listen attentively in a range of situations

✵ express themselves effectively, showing awareness of listeners’ needs.

Introduction

The place of drama in the primary school is usually seen as within the Spoken Language Programme of Study in the National Curriculum at Key Stages 1 and 2, although it also appears, through a focus on plays and play scripts in the Reading Programme of Study. This suggests a strong place for drama, but it would be a mistake to consider drama only as literature study. Techniques such as role play, hot seating and flashbacks can be used to explore other aspects of the curriculum such as history, science or PSHE. In this sense, drama is a vehicle for learning as well as a subject for study, and is cross-curricular in its application.

REFLECTIVE TASK

Drama in schools can have a number of meanings and different people interpret it in different ways. Before you read our discussion about the nature of drama in primary schools, it would be useful for you to think about this question for yourself.

✵ What examples of drama have you seen, led or taken part in in schools?

✵ Why were these examples being taught? In other words, what particular skills, attitudes or knowledge did the teacher hope to foster through them?

✵ Does drama only take place in drama lessons? What other contexts might there be for it?

Drama in primary schools

This chapter is concerned with required subject knowledge. It will, therefore, have little to say about the classroom techniques associated with drama as pedagogy that are not part of this required subject knowledge. They are more fully explored in the companion volume to this book. In this chapter, the focus will be on the analysis and evaluation of drama texts and a consideration of some of the technical language involved.

Analysing play texts can be done with a similar battery of straightforward literary critical procedures and technical terms to those used in the analysis of story and poetry, but evaluating different kinds of drama is just as subjective and hedged around with just as many provisos. Before any kind of analysis can be made, however, we need to consider why it is that drama games and performances and the reading and writing of drama texts are important in primary school classrooms.

Why is drama important?

It is difficult to be precise in a consideration of drama because it can be seen in at least three lights — as a teaching methodology, as a performance art, and as a literacy-directed activity. What these aspects share, however, is the notion that drama is associated with role play — of acting out a story. Children either make the story up for themselves (generally, but not necessarily, centring their improvisations on personal experience or an already known story), act out other people’s stories, or study the methods writers have used and the opportunities they have provided in drama texts for acting out a story. When seen in any of these ways, drama is another version of fiction. Even where the story told is a factual one, it is fictionalised by the dramatising process. A creator of drama, child or adult writer, selects and orders incidents for maximum effect and makes up the things that people say to give the chosen story momentum. Most functions or versions of drama in primary classrooms are important, therefore, for many of the same reasons that stories are important. We will begin then to consider why drama is important with a brief recap of those.

Drama as story

Like stories, drama has the potential to give great pleasure. It can do this by creating and satisfying the very basic human desire when confronted with narrative, which is to know what happens next. Like stories too, by encouraging children to organise their own and others’ experience into narrative form, drama helps them to make sense of the world. It can also enable children to experience the world vicariously. Active role play, perhaps more than the reading of stories, places children firmly into the situations of others and almost obliges them to see the world from different points of view. By being placed in this position, children discover aspects of human motivation and behaviour — what makes people act as they do — and this learning can often stimulate moral questions.

It is sometimes argued that the experience of drama and the study of drama texts puts children in touch with a common cultural heritage — much as the reading and study of stories does. This is not altogether true. It is the case, as Suzi Clipson-Boyles (1998) passionately argues, that drama is a universal cultural phenomenon, crossing geographical boundaries as it emerges in many forms around the world and that the power of story, the transmission of knowledge, the shaping of ideas and emotions into an art form which is alive, dynamic and interactive all make connections with human response which resonates with life itself.

The experiential and performance aspects of drama work, therefore, almost certainly do help children to understand and respond to that cultural heritage. There are crucial quantitative and qualitative differences between stories to be read by children and plays to be read by children. In less pompous words — there are a lot more stories than plays written for children to read and they are a lot better. The sheer body of outstandingly well-written stories for children, which are such a rich resource in primary classrooms, does not exist for drama. This is not to say that many plays have not been written by ’classic’ and ’significant modern authors’ for children. Writers like J. M. Barrie, David Wood, Brian Patten and Ken Campbell have all written plays for children; some for the theatre, some for television. However, these are plays written for performance generally by adults for a child audience rather than for children to read and perform themselves. The outstanding writers of drama for reading and performance by primary school children in their classrooms and school halls have yet to emerge. It is interesting to note that there are numerous awards for writers of stories for children, some for writers of poetry for children, a few for writers of information books for children, but none at all for writers of drama for children.

Drama as an aid to learning

There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence — though, it must be admitted, little objective research — to support the view that the acting out in role of issues arising from such things as historical events or incidents in poems or stories is both a popular and effective learning strategy. Some drama specialists go so far as to claim that there is nothing in the entire primary curriculum, including such unlikely areas as numeracy and science, that drama techniques cannot support and enhance. In a Year 2 classroom, for example, one of us had the pleasure of watching a group of English as a second language learners, wearing appropriate masks to represent the planets, spinning and revolving around a splendidly fiery sun!

Most young children enjoy performance and many children’s games have an acting content. From the moment that they line up dolls and stuffed toys to represent the class while they rant and rave and apply sound teachers’ tellings-off to recalcitrant teddies, or wrap up and nurture poorly dolls because they are ill, children engage in role play. Such role play games have an educational and a socialising function. Even at this preschool level, role play enables children to see matters from different perspectives. Where the observation and information to support such role play comes from it is hard to know — particularly in the representation of teachers. If real teachers went in for the corporal punishment, personal humiliation and downright sadism of their child imitators — many of whom will have never seen a real teacher at the age at which they are beating the stuffing out of their soft toy comforters — they would be whistled up before the beak before they could say Children Act. Mr Punch and The Beano have much to answer for!

The drama activities are encouraged, of course, through the early years in school with home corners and varieties of pretend environments from shops to ships and castles to coffee shops. Many action rhymes and songs from which children learn aspects of language and number have a role play element. When children’s fingers become Incey Wincey Spider climbing up the spout or the tops of children’s heads become the icing on Five Little Buns in the Baker’s Shop, the children are not just having a nice time taking part in drama activities. They are also learning both socially and cognitively.

PRACTICAL TASK

Make a list of as many children’s games as you can, using as much of your own experience as possible. How many of them involve some kind of role play? It is often said that children’s games are very important in children’s educational and social development. What sort of contribution might those that you have marked as role play games make to either or both of these? Be as specific as you can.

Drama can be more formally harnessed to support learning through the later years of Key Stage 1 and through Key Stage 2. Key moments in RE or history, for example, can spring to life through improvised or scripted drama. The flight of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage via the parting of the Red Sea for a whole school assembly is as nothing to an imaginative Year 1 teacher. What took Cecil B. De Mille a cast of thousands and millions of dollars can be managed perfectly well with two blue saris, a few dressing gowns and a willing suspension of disbelief. In the version we saw, however, after the Israelites had made good their escape between the saris held aloft and flapped energetically by a number of blue-clad sea sprites, the pursuing Egyptians were not keen on being engulfed by the returning waters. Much to the entertainment of the rest of the school audience, they put up a brave if ultimately unsuccessful fight. A re-enactment of a Viking funeral with Year 4 gives greater immediacy, involvement and potential for learning than any information book can give — though experience forces us to warn against any re-enactment of any battles, and you should steer well clear of the storming of the Bastille!

Drama as a resource for moral education

It can be argued that, even at this early developmental stage, such dramatic representation is a means of dealing with some tricky issues of social and moral education. We have already seen that stories for children, particularly fairy tales and legends, have a very strong moral purpose. By dramatising them, it becomes possible for children to experience the moral dilemmas for themselves and to consider aspects of human motivation and behaviour and of personal relationships that would be much more difficult to deal with in any other way. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, for instance, does not just enable children to produce different voices and give different characters to those involved in the story or to understand a plot that is strong on events — particularly the chronology of events — and of cause and effect. It also enables them to consider and discuss some matters concerning Goldilocks’ pretty unsocial behaviour (breaking and entering, theft, malicious damage and squatting) which, given the affection that children have for the story and the fact that their sympathy is nearly always with Goldilocks, might well go unnoticed. As the stories become more complex through the two key stages, so do the moral ideas that they embody. Dramatic representation can help children to understand that people and situations are not always good or bad. There are always complexities.

RESEARCH SUMMARY

The moral educational aspects of drama with primary school children are the ones that have most interested drama writers and researchers. The most articulate arguments are produced by Joe Winston in a series of articles and books — of which the most useful to trainee teachers is probably Drama, Literacy and Moral Education 5—11 (Winston, 2000). Here, Winston argues vigorously that dramatic enactment of stories and situations inevitably leads to moral questions that are important in children’s personal and social development. The book is particularly useful because it is rich in clear examples — and helpful plans!

PRACTICAL TASK

Choose any well-known fairy tale (apart from Goldilocks and the Three Bears) and imagine that you are going to dramatise it with a primary class year of your choice. Draw up a cast list. Now choose any one of the characters and write no more than a side of A4 describing the character and outlining the motivation for their behaviour in the story. Dig deep. You can make up incidents in the character’s past to explain or justify their actions if you like. Was the big bad wolf really brought up by his grandmother and physically abused as a cub? You tell me. It would explain a lot!

What are the moral issues contained in the story that dramatisation is likely to bring out?

You may be interested to know that this technique was used a great deal by Stanislavsky — the founder of the method school of acting!

Drama as an aid to language and literacy development

Drama activities with stories and poems in English or with situations and materials drawn from across the primary curriculum make a strong contribution to children’s literacy and language development.

For spoken language, they provide opportunities to engage actively with language issues in unfamiliar contexts, they provide new purposes for language and they often involve new audiences — or a familiar enough audience in a new role. Children both demonstrate and further their knowledge about such matters as language register by pretending not only to behave but also to speak like somebody else in a particular situation.

The re-enactment of rhymes and stories, for example in the Reception Year and the first two terms of Year 1, sharpens children’s awareness of the way that different kinds of people actually speak, of the importance of body language in the conveyance of meaning, and of the conventions of conversation — taking turns and listening, or at least appearing to listen. This improvised linguistic role play will later, at Key Stage 2 and beyond, be developed into considerations of the nature and functions of dialogue as a narrative device and as a means of revealing character.

Here are just a few of the possibilities of the drama activities that can make a contribution to children’s language range and experience:

✵ Improvisation — the children assume roles and improvise dialogue to suit the role that they are playing in a given situation. Such improvisation can easily lead on to presenting the outcome as a drama script and so make a very laudable link with literacy work.

✵ Simulation — a bit more preplanned and researched than an improvisation, in which children assume roles in an open-ended situation and dramatise the events. The teacher might well be in role here too. An example might be the teacher as a local government official at a public meeting to consider the selling off of the school’s grassy playing field for commercial development and the children as supporters, opponents or don’t knows.

✵ Tableaux and thought tracking — the children assume roles and freeze a moment in a narrative. While the moment is frozen, each character takes it in turn to speak aloud the thoughts of the character they are representing at the moment that they have chosen to freeze. Afterwards they can explain, again in role, the significance of the moment for their own character.

✵ Hot seating — children assume roles and are placed in the hot seat, where they have to withstand some rigorous questioning by the rest of the class about their motives and behaviour in the narrative.

✵ Puppets — children make puppets and then use them to perform an improvised or scripted story. The puppets can be as simple (finger puppets, paper bag puppets, sock puppets) or as complicated (jointed cardboard marionettes) as you like. Similar use can be made of masks that the children make.

The National Curriculum for English assumes that the reading of play scripts makes a contribution towards the development of children’s literacy. There is evidence to support the view that the wider the children’s experience of reading different kinds of texts, the better readers they become. As Margaret Meek says, children learn to read by reading and reading and working with drama texts obviously helps children to become familiar with a generic structure and layout quite different from any other kind of text. We will explore this generic structure and layout later.

Apart from this, however, the most significant value of the drama techniques described above lie in their text-level application — they help children’s literal and inferential comprehension of texts.

Role play activities with stories and poems enable children to clarify stories and get a firmer grasp on such issues as chronology of events, notions of cause and effect and the contributions of particular characters to the story, and therefore prepare the ground for more formal considerations of these matters in text-level work with written play scripts themselves. It is to such texts that we must now turn.

Analysing drama texts

Play scripts are similar to stories in some ways but different in others. They are similar in that they present a narrative that has a plot that is normally developed chronologically, and which involves characters doing things in a setting. The main and very important difference is that a story is meant to be read and only achieves its proper meaning in the relationship between writer and reader via the text. Plays, on the other hand, are meant to be acted and only achieve their full meaning in the relationship between writer and watcher via the text, the director, the actors, the designer, the lighting engineer, the sound engineer, the ticket sellers, the programme sellers and so on and so on. Play scripts are not intended simply to be read — there would be no point in writing them for that purpose. A dramatist might just as well write the story as a novel if that were the only intention. The relationship between a dramatist and an audience is far less intimate than the relationship between a story writer and an audience because it depends on many more intervening figures. A brilliant script can appear rubbish when it is incompetently directed or acted.

Much of what a dramatist writes in a script, therefore, is intended for a variety of audiences. It provides the words to be said by the actors, but it also implies the way that they should be said, the general tone of a scene, the way that that tone might be enhanced by sound or lighting effects and so on. These are buried messages that a story writer does not need to consider. Nonetheless, the play’s the thing, and the comparison with stories in the way that they are structured is a close one — even if the way of expressing the story is different.

The structure of play scripts

The notion of plays needing a beginning, a middle and an end derives from Part 2, Section 4 of Aristotle’s Poetics and is a familiar one in talking about any kind of composition. It implies that a story, however it is told, is a self-contained free-standing unit. As Aristotle puts it:

A beginning is that which does not necessarily suppose anything before it, but which requires something to follow it. An end …is that which requires something to precede it … but which nothing is required to follow. A middle is that which both supposes something to precede and requires something to follow.

As we have seen in the earlier analysis of story structures, contemporary genre theorists have accepted Aristotle’s broad definitions but have looked in rather more detail at the individual components. They may use different labels, but the ideas themselves are consistent enough. A beginning, for example, may consist of the ’Orientation’, the ’Exposition’ or the ’State of Equilibrium’. This is a difficult enough section for story writers to write and it is perhaps even more difficult for dramatists. The reasons for this are all to do with the relationship between the author, the text and the audience.

Here is the opening of a well-known story — the orientation section, if you like:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ’and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ’without pictures or conversation?’

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly…

And then something happens that takes us out of the orientation section and into the ’Inciting moment’, the ’Crisis’, the ’Problem’, the ’Breach’, the ’Complicating action’ or the ’Disruption’ — the start, if you like, of Aristotle’s ’middle’. If you don’t know what that something is, then you had better read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland immediately to find out! In fact …

PRACTICAL TASK

If you have never read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland you should seriously consider doing so if you can make time to do this before reading any further in this chapter!

If you have already read our earlier chapter on stories, you will immediately recognise that Lewis Carroll’s authorial voice is that of an omniscient, third-person narrator. He knows everything about the characters and events — even to the extent of what characters are thinking and feeling. In fact, this orientation is all about thoughts and feelings — there is no action at all. A dramatist, however, cannot step in in this way to tell the audience about the inner trials and tribulations of a character’s mind or soul. For a dramatist, virtually everything has to be done through the dialogue.

There are a few devices that may help — asides, voice-overs, soliloquies — but these are more appropriate for film and television. If they are overused by a dramatist they soon pall — unless the dramatist happens to be Shakespeare.

Of course a dramatist can make clear to actors and to a production team precisely how they want words to be said through the use of stage directions — but these stage directions in the script are not seen by an audience when a play is eventually presented.

There are other non-verbal means of conveying the way that characters are thinking and feeling. Sound effects — particularly music — and lighting effects can help. Again, however, these are particularly used in film and television drama, but are also valuable in theatrical performance.

However, even with these limited tools and devices available, it remains almost entirely through the dialogue that a dramatist tells a story and explores dramatic themes.

PRACTICAL TASK

Turn the opening two paragraphs of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland quoted above into the beginning of a play script. You will have to solve the problem of conveying Alice’s thoughts to an audience in some way. Use stage directions and any other devices that you like — ancient or post-modern — to do this.

Now briefly note the problems that you met as a would-be dramatist and how you solved them. Are there any implications for the way that children might need to be helped in their reading of play scripts?

As in prose stories, after the inciting moment, the action becomes more involved in a plot through the ’Development’ stage. The plots of plays — particularly those for primary school children — tend to be a good deal simpler than the plots of stories, with not so many narrative threads being woven together. This is true even in plays for adults. However, in the development of what is normally a single plot line, there are further crises, problems, complications and disruptions that the dramatist has to present as clearly but as interestingly and vividly as possible. Again, dialogue is almost the only medium available to the dramatist and they are in no position to step in to explain just why certain characters have behaved in the way that they have. If the dialogue does not make the events and the characters clear, then it has to remain unclear. There can be no other authorial presence.

The development, of course, as in stories, normally constitutes the bulk of the play — the largest component of the plot. It is in watching the twists and turns of story that is contained in the episodes of the development stage that much of the pleasure of a play exists. There are other pleasures, of course: the overall concept of the play, which is the work of the director, the individual performances of the actors, and so on, but these are not to be found in the text itself and are normally entirely outside a writer’s control. Again, like stories, when this stage is done with and the play is about to reach its conclusion, there are often moments when something happens to make this conclusion possible. These are moments of ’Denouement’ or ’Resolution’ when the watcher or reader can sense that the end is nigh, and after these moments, a play reaches its ’Ending’.

The ’Ending’, sometimes called ’Redress’, ’Reinstatement’, ’Conclusion’ or ’Coda’, is that part of the play’s plot line where all complications are resolved and redressed, order is restored and the events of the plot are concluded. Aristotle, you may remember, defined an ending as that which requires something to precede it but which nothing is required to follow. A small representation of some aspect of life is over and we can take from it what messages we will. The writer has nothing else to say on the subject. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, the rest is silence.

PRACTICAL TASK

Choose a play script aimed at primary school children and examine the dramatic structure carefully. Try to isolate the ’Inciting Moment’. Decide whether the Development presents a single strand plot or whether there are one or more sub-plots. How many episodes can you identify in the Development stage? Determine the point of ’Denouement’ in the story and how the playwright re-establishes normality.

The organisation of play scripts

Plays are organised in a different way from stories. Story writers for primary school children, especially picture book writers and illustrators, often think page by page. Of course, pages are linked together into a developing story and theme, or by some trickery with the book (holes through pages, lift-up flaps and so on) but it is important that small sections of text can be taken in as a self-contained chunk. Have a look at Rosie’s Walk, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, or Come Away from the Water, Shirley, for clear examples of this. More extended continuous prose writers for primary school children organise stories into chapters. These can be as numerous and as long or as short as a writer wishes — though teachers quite like books that have chapter lengths that are either appropriate for an end of the day story session or for 15 minutes of shared reading in a literacy session. Writers ignore these requirements at their peril! A chapter, too, is self-contained and tends to represent a single episode in the plot. The best chapters end on a very tense note (writers call it a hook), which leaves a reader just dying to know what happens next and rushing to read on. However, the thing about both of these organisational methods is that a story can be put down at any point and returned to, or not, whenever a reader decides.

Plays are not like that. If they are to be received as the author intended — that is, performed and watched rather than just read — they have to be received at a sitting — though an interval or two is probably acceptable if a play is a long one. This is not normally the case with play scripts for primary children, but playwrights do not have the same freedom with structure that story writers have. They organise their work into large sections called acts, and within these large sections there are shorter sections called scenes. Sometimes, these scenes are labelled as such by the writer — sometimes they are not. In that case a play’s director decides where one scene ends and another begins. Shakespeare’s plays are written in five acts with any number of named scenes inside each act. Modern full-length plays are normally written in two or three acts with individual scenes unidentified in the text. Plays for primary school children rarely have more than one act, though there may be any number of scenes, which an author sometimes identifies. Writers tend to try to maintain an audience’s interest by ensuring that individual scenes end on an exciting note.

The layout of play scripts

A drama script looks different from a story and children often have problems in reading it appropriately. Here is the first page of Love Me Tender, a play script by Alison Chaplin for upper Key Stage 2 children. It is a version of the first half of Romeo and Juliet and might well be appropriate for use in Year 5, before studying a Shakespeare play in Year 6.

The text here contains a lot of information intended for different people and presented in different ways. The font and typography differentiates to some extent between the intended different recipients of the different messages, but the fact that a variety of audiences is implied can cause confusion in inexperienced readers. Of course, this text is not meant for reading — it is meant for performing, and in the performance a good deal of the information on the page becomes irrelevant.

The text begins by locating the setting as ’a street in Verona’. This is not principally a message to the actors, though it certainly has implications for them. It is really a message to the set designer, the prop-maker and costumier — and the message is simple. Make sure that the setting, costume, make up and general demeanour of the actors looks like Verona. The fact that it is Verona where all of this takes place is actually very important in terms of the play itself because, well, they’re all Italians you know! Passionate, hot-blooded, dashing and romantic characters, the lot of them — loving, laughing, hating and fighting with equal enthusiasm! Obviously, the children will need to have done quite a lot of work on aspects of the location and historical period in which the play is set before they get round to this text (Alison Chaplin makes a great many valuable suggestions in the book containing the script about the nature of such work) but, even in that short introductory locating sentence, the limitations of a playwright to influence the story are clear. They cannot go into detailed descriptions and explanations. They can simply give a few indications of what they would like in an ideal world, then everything is passed into the hands of someone else.

A stage direction follows. This is again not really a message to the actors but to the director. It is isolated from the main text by lines and by the fact that it is set in italics. The names of characters are set in capitals both in stage directions and in the indications of which character says what in the dialogue sections. There is no universal convention for doing things in precisely this way. This is a pity because layout and typography vary from author to author and publisher to publisher and this inconsistency can present problems for inexperienced readers of play texts who are unused to their generic characteristics. In a story, every bit of text is required to be read. In a play, only bits of it are. The problems lie in knowing which bits! Here, Alison Chaplin and her publishers, Scholastic, have made a clear and very laudable effort to differentiate on the page between those sections of text that are to be read, learned and subsequently spoken aloud by actors as part of the play and those parts which are not. Unfortunately, there are instances (for example one on page 180) where bits of dialogue are also set in capitals and those bits do need to be spoken aloud.

In the dialogue sections themselves, there are also italicised sections that do not need to be read or spoken by performers because they indicate the ways in which the author wants the lines to be spoken and sometimes to whom the particular lines are to be directed to make sense of the story. These are clearly messages to the reader/performer, though the director might well be interested in these as well.

The point of all this is that there is quite a different relationship between a playwright, a play script and a reader from that of an author, a story and a reader. A playwright has far fewer descriptive tools at their disposal and a reader has to select very carefully from a text to decide what needs to be spoken and what does not, while at the same time picking up relevant messages in the text outside the dialogue. There is a real need for teaching and learning relating to these sorts of practicalities in the reading of the texts to take place during both the shared and any guided reading sections of a play script targeted literacy session for Key Stage 2.

Shakespearean drama at Key Stage 2

One of the recurring recommendations throughout the development of the National Curriculum for English has been for the study of a Shakespeare play towards the end of the primary years. Shakespeare wrote or had a hand in writing well over 30 plays, of which very few, because of their themes, are actually appropriate for ten-year-old children. Even those few are not appropriate in their entirety. A teacher needs to be careful in the selection of Shakespearean material for primary children and in practice many have found it far more sensible to work with extracts from texts rather than with complete plays. There are available numerous versions of Shakespeare’s plays written as stories and these can form very good starting points for the study of extracts from the plays themselves. As far as your own knowledge as trainee teachers is concerned, you will obviously need to know a little about Shakespeare’s plays and that means reading some or, far better, going to see some performed.

Shakespeare’s theatre

Shakespeare’s plays were written around 400 years ago at a time when the theatre and the conventions of play writing were very different from what they are today. The theatres were open air — if it rained, most of the audience got wet — and the stages protruded into the audience, which meant that entrances and exits were largely from the back of the stage rather than the sides. There was a gallery on which scenes could be played, and a trap-doored under-stage area that could also be used at appropriate moments. There was minimal scenery, and no artificial lighting. Props, too, were fairly basic. This meant that all of the scene creation had to be done in the audience’s imaginations and these had to be stimulated by Shakespeare’s powers of language. Have a look at the speeches by Chorus at the beginning of each act of Henry V to see the clearest examples of this.

The structure and forms of Shakespeare’s plays

The plays are now all divided into acts and scenes, though in the earliest printed versions of many of them this was not the case. In those versions, the plays were continuous with no demarcations at all. Subsequent editions, though, have all the plays divided into five acts with any number of scenes in each act. Individual scenes are located in a single place and when that place changes, so does the scene.

They are written in a mixture of prose and verse. In many cases, Shakespeare makes his lower-class characters speak in prose while the upper classes use poetry — though this is not invariably the case. The poetry that Shakespeare uses varies. The most consistent rhythmical form divided each line into five metrical sections, each with two beats. The second beat is stressed. Another famous opening provides an example:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

The mechanical way to read this is to read each line as five di-dums. In English prosody, a di-dum rhythmical pattern is called an iamb. The adjective from iamb is iambic. There are five iambic metrical beats to the line. The Greek prefix (and when talking about poetry, most of the technical terms originate in Greek) is pent. Each line is a pentameter and because it is composed of iambs it is an iambic pentameter. Shakespeare’s plays are written very largely in iambic pentameters. He does occasionally throw in a few songs in a different rhythm, but iambic pentameter is largely the form for the verse passages. Of course, the lines are not actually spoken with the mechanical di-dum stresses of iambic pentameter. That would make them very monotonous and very dull, and pretty well strip them of meaning. A good actor superimposes the iambic form with the stresses of everyday language. Nonetheless, the pulse of the iambic pentameter beats fairly insistently underneath the speeches.

Most of Shakespeare’s verse passages do not rhyme. He used rhyme sometimes for particular effects — when he wanted to give an especially romantic feel to a section of dialogue, for instance, or for magical effects between fairies or spirits — and he often used a rhyming couplet to signify the end of a scene. For the most part, however, the verse is unrhymed.

The dialogue is not naturalistic. Nobody spoke in iambic pentameter all the time in Shakespeare’s England and certainly nobody used the same range and invention of figurative language — of similes, metaphors, personifications and the whole gamut of rhetorical devices that are available in the English language — as richly and brilliantly as Shakespeare’s characters use them in the plays.

Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s dialogue is brilliant in conveying character. It is often said that even the smallest walk-on role in Shakespeare presents a fully rounded character to the audience. We only see the drunken porter once in Macbeth, but in 40 lines of that one short scene (Act 2, scene iii) Shakespeare has created, using dialogue alone, a complete human being. There are some difficulties with the language, though. Shakespeare’s characters use the lexis and the language styles of Tudor England at the end of the sixteenth century. Twenty-first-century primary school children inevitably find this a challenge. So, sometimes, do twenty-first-century adults. This is particularly true of comic scenes. Just as any dramatist writing nowadays would, Shakespeare gives such scenes lots of topical references, lots of currently popular songs, and lots of trendy jokes that no doubt had people falling about in Pudding Lane in the 1600s but somehow fail to hack it today. We have to accept that on the page many of those scenes are not particularly funny nowadays. However, as has been frequently emphasised in this chapter, plays are not intended to be responded to ’on the page’ but ’on the stage’. In performance and with inventive direction and some judicial cutting, even the most dated of Shakespeare’s comic scenes can spring to life and to laughs.

PEDAGOGICAL LINK

Make sure that drama books are properly represented in any classroom book collection. It is unlikely that children will read plays unless they are available to them. In Year 6, collections of tales from Shakespeare — of which there are a generous abundance — should form a conspicuous part of the classroom book corner and be well represented in the school library.

Evaluating drama texts

It has been stressed in the chapters on story and poetry that literary judgement on them is ultimately a very personal matter. The same is true for drama. The value that any individual places on any text in any genre is, in the end, a matter of taste. There are certain aspects of the text that may provide the basis for an evaluation — certain criteria — but when two people make judgements about precisely the same aspects of the text using precisely the same criteria they are quite likely to come to different conclusions because their tastes are different.

Before we come to those criteria, though, it has to be re-emphasised that drama texts for reading and performance by primary school children are a comparatively recent phenomenon. The availability of primary targeted play scripts is steadily increasing — though this does not necessarily mean that the quality of the texts themselves is improving. The texts have been written often simply to fill a hole in pedagogical resources and to make a publisher’s profit — not necessarily because the writers have a burning, artistic need to write them. I do not think that writers of drama for reading and performance by primary children will be offended by the judgement that the equivalents amongst them of story writers of the quality of such as Philippa Pearce, Betsy Byars, Anne Fine or Philip Pullman, or of poets such as Kit Wright, Michael Rosen or John Agard, have yet to emerge.

PRACTICAL TASK

Read at least one play from at least three of the following series of drama scripts for primary school children:

✵ Oxford Reading Tree Play Scripts (OUP)

✵ Performance Plays (Scholastic)

✵ Plays for Infants: Traditional Tales (Ginn)

✵ Reading 2000 Play scripts (Longman)

✵ Sunshine Plays (Heinemann)

✵ Whodunnits (Collins)

Now why not try writing one of your own? You will probably learn more about technicalities from that activity than from reading a book about them!

In overall terms, the criteria for evaluating the quality of play scripts are very similar to those for evaluating stories. There are a few adjustments to be made to emphasis, however, since plays reveal their plots in a different way from stories — namely, through the dialogue. Nonetheless, dramatists do have a similar range of approaches at their disposal. They can, as Polonius puts it in Hamlet, write Tragedy, Comedy, History, Pastoral, Pastoral-Comical, Historical-Pastoral, Tragical-Historical, Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral. There are many others! On the whole, though, we assume that most dramatists try to make their plays naturalistic — that is, they try to represent the world as it really is, to make characters speak and behave in as realistic a way as possible and to make stories develop as they might be expected to in the real world outside the play script. However, there is no reason why this should be so. Drama for children can be as fantastic, as anthropomorphic, as whimsical, as metaphorical and as symbolic as stories can be and provide just as effective a launch pad for children’s imaginations. They can also use conventions that are not open to story writers — like mime, song, visual jokes and tricks or choruses.

Appropriateness

Like stories, the content and the language of plays need to be appropriate to the children with whom you plan to use them. Since children mature at different rates and develop their range of language skills at different rates, this is not always an easy judgement to make. Actually, the danger with some drama for children is not that it is too difficult in content and language but that it is too simple. There is often more than a mere whiff of patronisation — of writing down, but this is a judgement that teachers can only make given the age, language skills and ability range of the children in front of them. It is also important to choose texts that you find interesting — your enthusiasm can be infectious to the children.

Plot and themes

The plot of a play is what really holds the interest. It is mainly the plot that stimulates a watcher’s or reader’s curiosity and the desire to keep on watching or reading to find out what happens next. Adults in the theatre have been known to walk out very noisily when they are bored or disappointed by the quality of a play. Children are not generally in a position to do that or to throw a play script down in disgust — particularly if it is being used as a literacy resource. It is important, therefore, to make sure beforehand that the plot of a play is likely to be interesting to the children and to hold their attention — to make them actually care about what happens to the characters in the play and about how the plot will turn out.

As with stories, the plots of good plays do more than just develop a storyline and tell us what happens to the people involved. They raise issues for an audience or a reader — they explore and develop themes. In evaluating the worth of a play script, therefore, teachers need to make a judgement first of all about whether the plot is appropriate to the children with whom they intend to read it and act it out. This does not mean that a play has to reflect directly the lives that the children live. It may do that, but it may also extend and enrich children’s experience by placing them into the roles, giving them the thoughts, feelings, language and characteristics of others. What is necessary in either case, however, is that the events and relationships in a story need to be comprehensible to children given their age and stage of intellectual and emotional development. A teacher needs to judge whether a play is likely to entertain, excite, interest and intrigue children and whether it says something that is worth saying. Good plays take an audience or a reader beyond mere plot and it is important that the themes they explore are also relevant and comprehensible to the children.

Characters

Characters in plays are often delineated in much less detail than they are in stories. This is because a playwright does not have the same resources as an author to delineate them. Characters in plays are established entirely through what they say and do or by what other characters say about them and this last is not always trustworthy. Much, therefore, has to be made of an actor’s or reader’s interpretative and performance skills. In plays for children, because they are short, characters are generally only very broadly sketched. All a teacher can do is be convinced that the characters are solidly enough presented to be credible and that the children will care about what happens to them.

Dialogue

Since it is mainly through dialogue that characters are conveyed and that the story is told, it is important that the writing is strong and convincing enough to do both. If the writing is poor then plays lose momentum and become turgid. If the writing is good then dialogue sparkles and delights. This is a section from a very surreal little play called Hoff the Cat Dealer by Andrew Davies (1986). Hoff has got the sack from his job at the car factory and has come home to tell his wife the bad news — he’s got the sack — and the good news — he’s got a cat:

The ear for dialogue here is brilliant. To begin with, the characters speak in ways appropriate to their very broadly drawn characters — Hoff, long-suffering but basically kind, Mrs Hoff, ambitious, long-suffering in her marriage to Hoff, sharp and short-tempered, and the cat, as unforecastable and eccentric as most cats are and with a wide range of vocabulary and phraseology in fluent Catese. Beyond that, the dialogue has the vocabulary and the rhythms of everyday speech that children will recognise and associate with. It is easy to say and comes in rapid interchanges. There are no moments when a character makes a long speech while the others stand around listening and admiring. Even though the plot is unlikely, the dialogue isn’t. This is far from easy to achieve and in some plays for both children and adults the vocabulary and rhythms are so far removed from normal speech patterns that lines become virtually unsayable. As a matter of interest, in this particular play, there are opportunities for children to bring and use their own experience and knowledge of the Cat language, but in order to find out how you will have to read the play!

Language

As with stories, the most obvious requirement of the language in a play script is that it must be appropriate and comprehensible to the child audience. Children should certainly be stretched linguistically in the texts that they read, but if the level of difficulty of the language means that they cannot decode it, or have to go scurrying to the dictionary every two minutes to check for meaning, then the language and the text itself is not appropriate. It is largely this criterion that causes a controversy over the inclusion of Shakespeare in Year 6.

Shakespeare, though, is a special case. Obviously, teachers will need to work very hard to make some of the language accessible to Year 6 children and obviously the story of any chosen extract needs to be clarified before any work on the text itself can take place. Once the story is clear, however, the difficult aspects of the language generally become less difficult and the children can often be astonished at the wonderful opportunities that Shakespeare’s rich and inventive language provided for application outside the literacy session. Certainly Sir Toby Belch’s ’Sneck up’ and ’Shog off’ have stood me in good stead over the years, and I have heard children wince with a mixture of horror, pleasure and astonishment when they have understood the imagery and vocabulary of the Captain’s praise of Macbeth in Act 1, scene i he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps. Reading Shakespeare has the potential to wake children up to the enormous richness of spoken language — as well, of course, as beginning a process of familiarisation with the work of arguably the greatest poetic user of the English language that the world has ever known.

In the primary years, however, the dialogue of plays tends to reflect the ordinary speech patterns of everyday life as it is lived by the children. They can generally make such language sound much more convincing than any other kind. Consequently, there is less opportunity for a writer of plays to go in for fancy figurative language to the same extent as story writers or poets. Similes, metaphors and rhetorical devices are a lot less common in plays than they are in other genres of imaginative language work. When evaluating a play, therefore, we need to ask whether the language and the dialogue are clear, authentic and with a sense of the rhythms of everyday speech.

The play script as an object

All of the things that have already been said about story and poetry books apply equally well to drama books. Presentation is just as important for play scripts as for anything else. This does not simply mean that the various facets of the text (characters, stage directions and dialogue) should all be indicated clearly in font and typographical differences but that the book should encourage a child to pick it up and read it independently or with friends. Individual and collections of play scripts need to be visually attractive, with an appropriately sized font and a reader-friendly layout and intelligent and appropriate use of illustrations.

PEDAGOGICAL LINK

Children pick up a book first because they are interested in it as an object. Publishers know this and ensure that the cover is bright, colourful and attractive. Play scripts, because of the special requirements that they have of their readers, are the least likely of all the primary school textual genres to be picked up and read independently by children. If plays are displayed in classrooms or school libraries with the spine out, then the attractiveness of the cover is lost. Try to make sure that as many playbooks as possible — and particularly the ones you are using at any particular time — are displayed so that the publisher’s hard work can be put to use and the covers can be seen.

PRACTICAL TASK

Any drama work with children depends on a teacher’s knowledge of the play texts available. This does not just mean knowing about the language, plots and structures of plays; it means knowing who are the good writers most likely to stimulate your class. That, in turn, means reading a lot of plays for children. This task is a long-term one. It is to read at least one collection of plays for children every month for the rest of your training and teaching career.

PRACTICAL TASK

New writers for children are constantly appearing. It is important that teachers keep up to date. There are a number of ways of doing this and a list of possibilities follows. Make sure you do at least one of them.

✵ Visit a bookshop regularly and browse in the children’s section.

✵ Visit a library regularly. Browse and ask advice from the children’s librarian.

✵ Read reviews of children’s books. There are specialist journal publications, the TES and Sunday broadsheet newspapers have reviews, the bookseller Waterstone’s produces a yearly Guide to Children’s Books and Penguin publications has its own The Good Book Guide to Children’s Books.

✵ Look regularly at the books that specialist book clubs or publishers are offering.

✵ Listen to children to hear what they are reading and for ideas of what is popular on film and television — these could be useful stimuli for children writing their own play scripts.

A SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

The term ’drama’ has a number of possible interpretations.

Drama strategies and scripts can be used for a number of different purposes in primary classrooms. They provide a framework for organising experience and an opportunity for extending it.

Drama shares many of the qualities and uses of story, though there is not an equivalent canon of outstanding work available to teachers and therefore not the same sense of a common culture. It can, however, provide similar support for learning across the curriculum, similar support for moral education and similar support for language and literacy development.

The plots of plays can be analysed in exactly the same way that the plots of stories are analysed.

There are significant differences between stories and play scripts in their presentation because play scripts are written for a variety of audiences looking at the text for different purposes rather than a solitary reader.

Where Shakespeare is taught in Year 6, it must be remembered that his plays are very much of their time in matters of structure and language.

There are a number of criteria that relate to the evaluation of play scripts for primary children. These include appropriateness, plot and themes, characters, dialogue, language, and overall presentation.

M-LEVEL EXTENSION

As good quality play scripts for primary children are not as readily available as stories and poems, work collaboratively with colleagues (fellow trainee teachers as well as the teachers and subject leaders with whom you work) to compile a list of favourite play texts that children of different ages have enjoyed. Include notes of any cross-curricular links and aspects of children’s development that each support.

FURTHER READING

DfE (2013) Teachers’ Standards. London: DfE. (www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/208682/Teachers__Standards_2013.pdf)

Somers, J. (1994) Drama in the Curriculum. London: Cassell. This is a detailed examination of most aspects of drama work in primary schools. It is very strong indeed, however, on issues of role play and of theatricality and Somers writes about these from both theoretical and practical viewpoints.

Winston, J. (2000) Drama, Literacy and Moral Education 5—11. London: David Fulton. This is rich in practical ideas for using stories as starting points for drama work which is designed to develop both literacy skills and moral education.

Woolland, B. (2010) Teaching Primary Drama. London: Longman. This is another book which is full of practical ideas for using drama techniques in a variety of ways, including suggestions for using drama as a strategy for teaching poetry and story.