Martin Illingworth highlights the potential of the postpandemic educational landscape to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the purposes and practices of English. His article proposes that drama has an important part to play.

‘Think how awful it would be … to live within such splendidness and not to see such splendidness.’ (David Almond, Bone Music, 2021)

What’s changed?

Our children are back from the two-year hibernation foisted upon them. They are having to re-learn their civic manoeuvring. When to fit in, when to stand out. They are approaching anew the difficult teenage preoccupation of trying to feel comfortable in their own skin and in the sudden proximity of their peers. They are having to conjure up the skills of speaking and listening to each other in person, an art lost in a hiatus of distancing and Zoom calls. They are having to re-establish who they might be and how to speak up so that the world knows them again.

This is no small set of tasks. The promised bright futures of the pre-pandemic world are once again appearing on their horizons, and we need to support our children to rise to their potential.

Let’s be honest here: there is far too much passive reception of old knowledge in our school curriculum which has to be memorised, tested, and then largely forgotten. Remembering facts is a peculiarly useless focus for an education, given the limitless storage banks that we have in our back pockets. This passivity, this sitting down to learn (who decided that we learn best sitting down?) is not really the approach required. Our children have been sitting down at home for too long in recent times. Others, still, haven’t sat down very much at all in those isolated years and no longer have the capacity to sit for five hours a day.

There is every need to stand up and shout, and to make a song and dance about being back.

An English fit for purpose?

Alongside this, the world of work is not waiting for young people who can write with paper and pen. We write digitally now. We present ourselves digitally. The biggest area of growth in the job sector is selfemployment. Someone who is going to advertise their products and services on the internet needs a curriculum from which they are able to manicure their social and business media sites rather than the current curriculum fodder of writing a speech and a letter to a friend. Digital platforms are visual, they are cinematic, they have endless potential.

In preparing for this environment, the subject of Drama gains yet another and renewed reason for being.

Right now, the key skill that our unnerved, tentative, and returning children need to develop is confidence. The confidence to learn, unlearn and relearn. The confidence to stand up and say what they think. We must let the children know that they have something worth saying and that they will be listened to. Drama is a key subject in this pursuit and very importantly, as part of the English curriculum, it is one that can foster this sense of confidence.

‘The key skill that our children need to develop is confidence. The confidence to learn, unlearn and relearn. The confidence to stand up and say what they think. We must let them know that they will be listened to. Drama is a key subject in this pursuit and, as part of the English curriculum, it is one that can foster this sense of confidence.’

Reading plays as plays: GCSE requirements

Studying a playscript whilst sitting in rows in a classroom is nowhere near the experience of a play. This approach can lead to an understanding of the play that is limited to what happens in the plot, how the characters feel and what the themes are. This then becomes a genre-less study of a story.

At this level the text might be a poem, a novel, non-fiction, anything. We need to consider the distinctiveness of plays if we are to see them as they are, and by extension help our pupils write about plays as plays. Your chosen GCSE Chief Examiner will have reported the need to write about plays as plays over and over again in their annual reports. And yet, their words go largely unheard

.Your pupils need to show in their exam scripts that they appreciate the guiding hand creating the play, that a play is a visual medium, shared by a collective audience, and that the playscript is a set of instructions not a finished work of art. They need to be able to discuss how actors might deliver lines and move about a stage. They need to be able to discuss the potential of set design and the ways in which the set, the action and the purposes of the playwright can knit together.

Introducing Caliban

Let’s consider the appearance of Caliban towards the end of Act I Scene ii of The Tempest. Caliban is a product of the earthy natural environment of the largely uninhabited island setting. He is the child of the witch Sycorax and the devil. Prospero the magician has made Caliban his servant or, more accurately, his slave. Throughout most of the play, Caliban is rude and rebellious and is only controlled through the use of magic spells. He feels that the island has been taken from him. Interestingly for a seeming monster, Caliban is capable of very beautiful speech. He is also able to swear.

Here is Caliban’s opening set of lines:

‘I must eat my dinner.
This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee
And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ the island.’

We are near the beginning of the play, just finding our way with the setting and the relationships between the characters. Can we investigate what is going on here? Can we pose questions?

•Why does Shakespeare have Caliban come on stage here at all? There doesn’t seem to be any need in terms of the plot for him to be there. The play could function in term sof plot if Caliban did not appear here. Is it just to have himcome out to show the audience the monster?

• How should our actor deliver these lines? We could examine the eloquence of Caliban’s speech and wonder why Shakespeare has made him so articulate.

• The setting for Act I Scene ii (Prospero’s cell) is frequentlyused throughout the play. How would we design thestaging here?

• Where shall we have the actors positioned as Caliban delivers his lines. Prospero has spent a good deal of time in this scene explaining to Miranda, his daughter, the shipwreck that she has witnessed. Should the arrival of Caliban change the dynamic on stage. Could we have Caliban circling the magician and his daughter? Is he speaking directly to Prospero and Miranda, or is he speaking in an aside, as if secretly voicing his thoughts? How would this change the meaning and impact of the words?

Finding their voices

In looking for answers to these questions (aren’t questions without answers so much better than questions with definite answers?), we can gather in groups to discuss, to plan, to draw, to create, to perform, to agree, to disagree, to think, to organise, to make choices, to try things out. Our collective intelligence will outweigh our individual intellects. In all of this, we can consider the play as a play, and in doing so, we will get closer to what the examiner wants from us, as well as, more importantly, an appreciation of the artfulness of plays and playmaking. Hopefully and potentially, our children can find their confident voices.