Command words and the theatre-maker voice: reading OCR command words (Explain, Discuss, Analyse, Evaluate, As a director/performer/designer) and answering through specific, justified practical choices tied to audience effect.

What this dot point is asking

OCR Drama and Theatre written questions use command words (Explain, Describe, Discuss, Analyse, Evaluate) and role prompts (As a director, As a performer, As a designer). Reading both correctly tells you exactly what to do: the command word sets the task, and the role prompt sets the voice you answer in. The unifying skill is answering through specific, justified practical choices tied to audience effect, in the role the question fixes. This dot point is about command words and the theatre-maker voice; Section A, closed-book technique and essay structure have their own pages.

The answer

Marks are lost when students answer the wrong question: ignoring the role, or treating an "explain" as a description. Reading the command word and the role prompt accurately is the first discipline, and answering in the theatre-maker voice is the second.

The command words

Each command word sets a different task.

• Explain - give reasons. Make a choice and justify it by what it communicates.
• Describe - set out what you would do, in practical detail.
• Discuss - consider and justify a range of choices or approaches, developing a treatment.
• Analyse - break down practical choices and their effects on the audience.
• Evaluate (and "how effectively", "to what extent") - judge effectiveness with justification, weighing alternatives (chiefly in the live theatre section).

The role prompts

The role prompt fixes the voice you answer in, and you must sustain it.

• As a director - staging, blocking, pace, casting and the whole interpretation.
• As a performer - vocal and physical choices and characterisation.
• As a designer - set and staging, lighting, sound, or costume, in your discipline.

Mixing roles incoherently, or answering as a critic when the question fixes a maker's role, costs marks.

The unifying skill: justified choices for an audience

Across every command word and role, the task is the same: make specific, practical choices and justify them by their effect on the audience. This is the feature-to-effect habit, and it is what earns AO2 throughout. A choice with no audience effect, or an effect with no choice, is incomplete.

Examples in context

Given "As a designer, explain how you would use lighting and sound at a key moment to communicate tension," a weak answer describes the moment or discusses tension in general. A strong answer stays in the designer's voice and obeys "explain": "I would tighten from a general wash to a hard, narrow corridor of light trapping the characters, because the shrinking space makes the audience feel the situation closing in, and I would bring in a low pulse under the dialogue that quickens with the exchange, because the rising rhythm drives the tension without the audience consciously noticing." Each choice is justified by its audience effect, in the fixed role, matched to the command word.

Try this

Q1. What does the command word "explain" require, and how does it differ from "describe"? [2 marks]

• Cue. "Explain" requires reasons (a choice justified by what it communicates); "describe" requires setting out what you would do in practical detail, without the same emphasis on justification.

Q2. What does a role prompt such as "as a designer" fix, and why does it matter? [2 marks]

• Cue. It fixes the voice you answer in (here, design choices in a discipline). Answering in the wrong role, or as a critic, answers a different question and costs marks.

Q3. As a director, explain how you would stage a key moment to communicate a relationship to an audience. [12 marks]

• What the marker wants. A consistent director's voice obeying "explain": specific staging choices (blocking, proxemics, pace, design), each justified by what it communicates about the relationship to the audience.

A note on application

This guide is AI-written and not individually human-reviewed. Command-word and role conventions apply across both written papers; always match the task and sustain the role, because answering the wrong question is the commonest avoidable error.