We are now beginning our "Theatre in Education" unit. We need to find a piece that is educational and entertaining. The title makes it clear that our purpose is to be educational, but by making it as entertaining as possible, the children will remember it more and hopefully learn more.
We firstly considered the play "Mugged" by Andrew Payne. It had potential for our class to do as it is educational and relevant to our audience, as it is about school students (and contain problems they face). However, this play our cast is not the right size for this play - as I am the only girl in the class. We also felt that this play was over-done and is a bit too basic, as it is aimed at KS3 students. We then considered the play "Face" by Benjamin Zephaniah. I studied this play for GCSE and thought it would be a good one to do as it is very educational and would always be relevant. This play is very hard-hitting and more suitable for an older audience. This play explores bullying, facial disfigurement, confidence, relationships and determination. It is very inspiring and would have been an ideal play, but it contains a lot of characters. Multi-rolling is obviously a possibility, but it doesn't work as well for serious pieces as it does for comedies.
We then thought that we could be different - instead of going for something typical like drug abuse, fire safety or bullying, we thought we could do Shakespeare. As Shakespeare is on the national curriculum for English, we could do a piece to make it more accessible for younger people. Shakespeare was made to be performed, so sitting down in a classroom reading it isn't very enjoyable for students - so if we did a piece for them, they might enjoy it and learn more.
Three plays that we could have done were "Macbeth", "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "A Comedy of Errors". We decided not to do "Macbeth" as not only is it done a lot, but we didn't want to perform anything too heavy or threatening. Therefore, we decided that we wanted to do a comedy - this made up come up with "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "A Comedy of Errors". Although the latter would have been very appealing to our young audience (due to its frantic nature and slapstick moments), it wouldn't have worked for our cast as this play is about mistaken identity in two sets of twins, and with only one girl in the cast and none of the boys looking similar (not even in build) this would have been a struggle! We decided on "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the end as it is a very funny play in which we would need to do a lot of multi-rolling - which in itself brings a lot of comedic opportunities. We would also need one of the boys to play Helena (which will be entertaining!), so we can add more comedy in here. We won't be performing the whole play, as this will be far too long for our young audience (as younger audiences tend to have shorter attention spans). We shall also need to cut down the script as there are too many characters in it and not all of the dialogue is essential to the plot. We want to make our version as entertaining as possible, but our other and main purpose is to educate - we aim to make the Shakespearean language accessible and understandable to our audience, so we shall cut a lot of the dialogue down to get the key information across. Also to help the audience understand it better, we shall have to have really good body language and use a lot of gestus.
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