Quick questions on Staging a text as performer, director and designer - WJEC A-Level Drama and Theatre

When you write as a performer, you are not describing how the character feels; you are deciding what the actor does to make the audience feel it. Layer the vocal and physical choices so they combine into one clear impression.

The director shapes the whole stage picture and the audience's reading of it. The director's tools are proxemics (the distances between characters and between actors and audience), the stage form (end-on, thrust, in-the-round, traverse, promenade) and the audience relationship it creates, levels and the use of height, focus (where the audience looks), and the composition of stage pictures. The director also guides the performers, but the distinctive directorial contribution is the spatial and visual storytelling.

The designer creates the visual and aural world through set, costume, lighting and sound. Accuracy matters: for lighting, name the angle (front, side, top, backlight), colour, intensity, state and transitions; for sound, the cue, its source (live or recorded, on or off stage), level and timing; for set and costume, the period, materials, colour, condition and the meaning they carry. Every design choice must serve the moment and have a stated effect on the audience.

Take a moment where a character realises they have been betrayed. As a performer, you might hold a two-second stillness, drop the voice to a flat, controlled tone, then turn the head slowly away, so the audience reads suppressed devastation. As a director, you might place the betrayer upstage and bright while the betrayed stands downstage in shadow with their back to them, so the audience sees the power imbalance and the isolation before a word is spoken.

"Atmospheric lighting" earns little. Give the angle, colour, intensity, state and transition.

The commonest fault in the whole paper. Every choice needs its audience effect attached.

Name the three theatre-maker roles you may be asked to write as. [2 marks]

Give one specific choice for the same moment in each role. [3 marks]

Explain how a performer, a director and a designer would each stage the same moment of a play and the effect each intends. [10 marks]