OCR A-Level Drama and Theatre: Deconstructing Texts for Performance paper overview quiz quiz

A 1 hour closed-book paper on one set text, answered as a director and designer (60 marks)

A 2 hour open-book essay comparing two different set texts side by side

A practical group performance assessed live by a visiting examiner

An analysis of an unseen printed extract taken from a play that the student has never read or studied before

AO1 and AO4

AO2 and AO3

AO3 and AO4

AO1 and AO2

It is considerably longer than a typical literature essay paper

It allows you to take an annotated copy of the play into the exam

It asks how you would stage the play, not what the text means on the page

It has no fixed set text at all and instead uses a completely different play each and every year

Two separate whole-play essay questions of equal length

A multiple-choice section followed by one extended essay

A live practical performance and a written evaluation report

An extract-focused question and a whole-play question

Coherence: the chosen moments read as one production from a single concept

The sheer number of separate clever staging ideas packed into the answer

The overall length of the answer and how many sides of paper it fills

The number of named theatre critics and scholars the answer manages to quote

Move the setting of the play into the present day at all costs, whatever the text actually supports

Decide what the play says now and shape the production to deliver that, rooted in the text

Ignore the play's original meaning entirely and impose a wholly unrelated new concept on it

Use only contemporary modern music and reject every other period of music outright

Strict realism and a great wealth of small naturalistic detail

The expense of the materials and the sheer scale of the set

Coherence (one design world) and change (states that move with the action)

Perfect left-to-right symmetry on stage and a single bold dominant colour throughout

Whether the point is fully historically accurate down to the last detail

Whether the contextual point is written at sufficient length on the page

Whether the point names a precise date for the events it describes

Whether it informs a staging or design choice the audience would read

It can honour, adapt or deliberately break with them, but the decision must be justified

It must always reproduce the original performance conditions exactly as they first were on the stage

It must always ignore the original conditions completely when staging the play today

The original performance conditions are wholly irrelevant to any modern production

It is not significant and makes no real difference to how you prepare

Every reference, moment and design idea must come from memory

The examiner provides a clean copy of the full set text in the exam

It only affects the timing of the paper and nothing else about it

A direct quotation closely analysed for its language and imagery

A historical fact about the period in which the play was written

A staging or design choice and its effect on the audience

A short summary of what happens at that point in the plot

By the student's predicted overall grade for the course

Randomly each year by the exam board's computer system

By the total length in minutes of the examination paper

By which set text the centre has chosen to study