Edexcel A-Level Drama and Theatre: Practitioners and theatre companies overview quiz quiz

To make the audience think critically about society and judge the social forces in the action

To overwhelm the audience's senses with a total assault of sound and image

To tell stories through the moving body alone, almost entirely without dialogue

Psychological truth: believable, motivated behaviour behind a fourth wall

Given circumstances

The alienation effect

Gestus

The Theatre of Cruelty

Bore the audience deliberately so that their attention drifts away from the events on the stage entirely

Keep the audience emotionally distanced and intellectually active so they judge the social issue

Make the audience empathise completely with the hero and lose themselves in the story

Confuse the audience by accident through clumsy or unclear staging

Any movement an actor makes on the stage, regardless of whether it carries any particular social meaning at all

A type of expressionistic lighting used to distort the stage picture

A clear gesture or stance that distils a character's social position and the social point of a moment

A naturalistic acting exercise drawn from Stanislavski's system

Literal violence and gore staged as graphically as possible to shock

Cruel and harsh treatment of the actors during rehearsal

A sad and distressing story

Rigour and intensity, an unflinching assault on the senses

An immersive or surrounding configuration that dissolves the actor-audience separation

A proscenium arch that keeps the audience seated at a safe and comfortable distance from the action

A traditional end-on stage with the audience all seated in front

A configuration that deliberately hides much of the action from view

Detailed and realistic sets that recreate each location convincingly on stage

The ensemble's body doing the work of the set through stylised mime

Restrained psychological realism in performance

Naturalistic, everyday conversational dialogue

Gestus and the alienation effect

Emotion memory recall

Building Blocks

The magic if exercise

It is always purely abstract movement with no connection to the story being told on stage

It uses no music or sound of any kind to accompany the choreographed sequences

It avoids the ensemble and is built almost entirely around solo performers

It is married to text and real emotion, carrying subtext and narrative

Collaborative, visual devised theatre that transforms bodies, objects and space

Naturalistic, text-faithful productions that stage the written play exactly as it stands

Solo performance built around a single actor on a bare stage

Verbatim documentary theatre only, assembled from interview transcripts

It is not useful at all, because each practitioner stands entirely on their own and gains nothing from being set beside another

Defining one against the other (for example Brecht against Stanislavski) sharpens your account of either

It guarantees full marks in the Section C answer on its own

It replaces the need to know your own chosen practitioner in any depth

Using the practitioner's techniques accurately so that they visibly shape the work

Choosing a practitioner whose methods genuinely fit the intention of the piece

Naming a practitioner whose actual methods do not appear in the work

Stating clearly why the chosen practitioner fits