Lesson video

Hi there, I'm Mrs. Bradley.

Welcome back to Drama and to lesson two.

In the life there to scheme of work which is looking at acting skills.

Today we'll continue to look at another clip of live theatre and to analyse the use of acting skills.

And if you're ready we'll get started.

In this lesson, you will need an exercise book or some paper to write on and a pen to write with.

So you should have done the intro quiz now which will have recapped some of your prior learning.

What we're going to do today is start by just recapping some of those acting skills we talked about last lesson because we're going to use those again today.

We're then going to watch an extract from another play and that's going to lead us into writing about the use of acting skills.

So we're going to build on what we started last lesson in terms of the describing and analysing and just build that into a bit of a paragraph today.

That will then take us to the end.

And don't forget to do the exit quiz which will just check your progress from today.

Our keywords for today, just some acting terminology words.

We're going to be looking at posture because that's the way an actor holds themselves.

And the posture will be important in the particular clip we look at.

We're going to look again at interpretation.

So remember that and interpretation is the way an actor understands a character and conveys that character.

So it's that version of the character.

And we're going to look at a contemporary interpretation.

So contemporary means something which is of the current day or the present time.

So let's start by just recapping the acting skills we looked at in the previous lesson.

I've put some words here, eight terminology words but I taken out the letters.

So all I've given you is the first letter of each word.

Can you just pause here and see if you can remember all of these acting terminology words? So they're all relating to acting.

They're all words that we either looked at last week or that I think you should already know.

So pause here, take as long as you need.

And then when you're ready, we'll look at the answers.

Great.

So here are your answers.

We had body language, pace, posture eye contact, pitch, facial expressions, gestures, and tone.

So just double check your answers.

Any that were not right, you can correct them now.

Check the spelling as well, because it's always important to check our spelling, punctuation and grammar in any piece of writing.

And then we'll use some of this terminology to talk about the acting we see in the extract today.

So today's task then, we're going to watch extract from the production, of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is by William Shakespeare.

And it's the Bridge Theatre production directed by Nicholas Hytner, which was then filmed by the National Theatre.

We're going to look at the acting skills and then with that we will analyse the character interpretations.

So our focus is very much on the performance and that's why we recapped those acting skills that we'll look at today.

So this play is one you may be familiar with, but just in case you're not, A Midsummer Night's Dream is about meddling fairies and lovers and some high-status Kings and Queens as well.

So it sets in a forest mostly, which is the home of the fairies and a fairy kingdom queen called Oberon Antar Titania.

So the fairy queen Titania in this extract has asked her servant, who is Puck the mischievous fairy to put a love potion in the eyes of a young man, who she wants to fall in love with this particular young woman who likes him.

But Puck has put the love potion in the wrong person's eyes and in the scene that we're going to watch she challenges him on what he's done, because he's done it wrong.

And then she wants him to go and correct his mistakes and then he leaves.

But as you will see, very unwillingly.

So that is a bit of context, which is the background to help you understand the scene.

So we're watching the scene what she says in the forest featuring the fairy queen Titania and the servant Puck.

As we watch, I want you to be a theatre detective.

So theatre detectives need to look really closely and examine all of the evidence.

So I want you to focus on asking yourself these questions.

So how have the current how have the actors interpreted their characters? What sorts of characters am I seeing here? How have the actors use their skills to do this? And what is the effect of the use of skill that I'm seeing? How did the audience respond? And what's my response as I'm watching? So they are questions I would like you to be really asking yourself as we've watched the extract.

If you want to pause here and make a note of these questions, that's absolutely fine.

And then when you're ready we'll move on to watching the clip.

Okay.

So here is the extract from the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

We're going to watch the clip twice.

So the first time you watch it, I don't want you to write anything down.

I just want you to watch and focus on the clip.

The second time, is the time for you to start making notes.

So make notes are the characterization you see and think about how the actors have interpreted their characters and use their skills to do this.

So if you're ready, let's watch it for the first time.

What has thou done? That has mistaken quite and laid the love juice on some true love's sights.

Oops.

About the woods go swifter than the wind, and Helena of Athens look thou find.

No.

All fancy-sick she is and pale of cheer, with sighs of love, that costs the fresh blood dear.

By some illusion see thou bring her here.

I'll charm his eyes against she do appear.

I go.

I go.

Look how I go.

Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow.

Okay, so let's watch that again now.

And now is your time to make some notes.

So this time focus on characterization, interpretations on how the actors are using their skills.

And don't forget you can pause the video at any point if you need to catch up on your note-taking.

So now let's watch, and make some notes on the acting.

What hast thou done? That has mistaken quite and laid the love juice on some true love's sights.

Oops.

About the woods go swifter than the wind, and Helena of Athens look thou find.

No.

All fancy-sick she is and pale of cheer, with sighs of love, that costs the fresh blood dear.

By some illusion see thou bring her here.

I'll charm his eyes against she do appear.

I go.

I go.

Look how I go.

Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow.

Great.

So that was the clip for the second time.

And I hope that time rounds, you were able to make lots of notes on the characterization, the interpretations and the description of how the actors use their skills.

If you need to pause here let's take more time to write your notes.

That's fine.

And then when you're ready we'll move on to look at what you may have written down.

Great.

So we're going to look at lots of detail at what you've written, but first of all, I want you to just do a little task to formulate your response.

So I want you to imagine you are writing a tweet.

So imagine you've just seen this production and you want to tweet about it to all of your followers.

I want you to write a response to this scene in 140 characters or less.

So that imposes quite a limit on you.

So you need to be very concise with your language try to use some description, analysis and evaluation, make it personal to you.

What did you think? And don't forget there are absolutely no wrong answers.

So this is an imaginary task.

I'm just asking you to imagine you're writing a tweet.

If you do want to post it on Twitter do remember please you must be above thirteen and you do need to ask a parent or carer first.

Suppose he had to write your tweet response and then we'll move on to expand on your response in more detail.

All right then.

So we asked you and two major questions, really.

How did the actors interpret their roles and how do they use their skills to do this? So thinking about the interpretation first of all, Titania is a very high status character.

Isn't she? Because she's a queen and she's interpreted here as being very demanding, very authoritative, very displeased.

I think with Puck.

Puck is in this production, a very contemporary fairy.

He's got quite a punk style.

Hasn't seen if you look at his costume his hair and his tattoos and his different parts of his costume.

He's perhaps interpreted as being lazy, is not very bright, maybe because he did the wrong thing.

He's tired.

He's a bit like a moody teenager, perhaps.

And he moans and he complains about having to do the jobs.

So that would be my interpretation.

You may have got down some similar ideas to that or you may have used some different terminology and language, which is fine.

So what we've got an idea of the interpretation what we then need to focus on is how did the actors use their skills to achieve these interpretations? So to do this, we're going to zoom in on specific lines from the scene.

So I've put a table together here which you can use if you want to, by just drawing this out or you can just write down bullet point notes for every line.

So I want you to look out the specific lines here and give me some descriptive language using the acting terminology for how these lines were delivered by the actors.

So we've got Titania's lines.

"What hast thou done?" We've got Puck's line.

"Oops" We've got Titania's line, "Mm" and we've got Puck's line, "I go, I go, I go." So they were all delivered in very specific ways.

And I want your description of how that was delivered.

I've given you an example here to set you off.

"What has thou done?" by the Titania was delivered with a loud volume.

It was very loud, wasn't it? It was authoritative.

She sounded like a parent or a teacher telling off the child.

She had a displeased tone.

So she was very unhappy about it.

She had a slow pace because she punctuated each word, didn't she? And that was to really hammer the message whom to Puck.

So that would be my description of how that line was delivered.

I've just spoke with some vocal skills there because the character of the Titania doesn't really move in this scene.

But if you're talking about Puck's lines, you can also give a physical description as well.

So pause here to make your descriptive notes.

And then when you're ready, we'll have a look at what you've got down.

Great.

So here are some suggestions of what you could have written.

What I would like you to do, just pause here, read through the answers.

If you want to add to your answers now, then you can do and then when you're ready we'll just move on to now look at analysing.

Great.

So we're going to focus on this structure of describe, analyse, evaluate.

I'm going to do that for Puck and the character of Titania.

So again, I've drawn this out like a table, just a separate.

And I thought if the description, the analysis, and the evaluation, if that's helpful for you you can draw out the table.

You don't have to though.

You can just use bullet point notes and I've separated this into the characters of Puck and Titania.

I've given you an example of the character of Puck.

So he groans loudly and he falls to his knees.

Then from his knees, he goes face down onto the floor with the most slumped posture.

That's my description of one particular moment of Puck's performance by David Moorst.

But then why does he do that? What's the analysis? So the analysis could be, this suggests to the audience that he's tired from his work so far, he's maybe also lazy and he can't be bothered to go correct his mistakes.

He groans like he really, really doesn't want to do anything else just thinking about that day.

So my analysis of that is that he's tired, is lazy, he can't be bothered, he doesn't want to do it.

So evaluation then, means how successful was that overall.

And then how did the audience respond? So my evaluation was that, that was very successful.

It was really, really good.

It was very successful in conveying a comic contemporary interpretation of the character, which creates humour for the audience because we heard it did make the audience laugh it's for me.

So the description is what the character did.

The analysis is why they did that and what it conveyed and the evaluation is how successful that was overall.

So what someone likes to do is do this for the character of Titania as well played by Gwendolyn Christie.

And then if you want to add another example for what Puck did using perhaps one of his lines, using a different parts of the scene.

I have not used here as my example, because the more you can develop your skills here, the better.

Great.

And to finish this lesson we're going to do a plenary paragraph.

So I would like you to now choose one character from your notes.

I have course Titania and you're going to write a paragraph.

So put your notes into formal sentences and structure about how successful this interpretation was in the extract.

And what's often here is put a structure together to help you do that, which is colour coded.

So, first of all, a context sentence.

So first of all, we would introduce the character and the scene we're going to write about because or else it just comes out of the blue, it doesn't have any context.

Then we would move on to the description.

So describing exactly how the actor use their skills to convey their role.

Moving on from that to the in analysis.

So we would then analyse why those choices were made by the actor.

And then finally moving on to evaluation.

Evaluating how successful this performance was.

So what I would like you to do now, is write your plenary paragraph.

So you've got fantastic notes from this lesson.

You've got loads of detail already built up.

You've been making notes all lesson it's just about now putting that into the structure that we've just looked at a context sentence, accurate acting terminology to describe it, a detailed analysis, to say why those choices were made and then finally, an evaluation.

So pause the video here for as long as you need to complete your paragraph and then we'll resume when you're ready.

Great work, well done.

So you've made loads of notes today with some really specific acting terminology.

You've analysed why choices were made and it linked that to the interpretations of characters.

And then you've managed to evaluate afterwards putting that into a paragraph about how successful that performance was.

So well done, some really, really great work today and take care and I'll see you next time.