Staging a text as performer, director and designer: making and justifying vocal and physical choices (performer), spatial and staging choices (director) and set, costume, lighting and sound choices (designer), each tied to the effect on an audience, the core skill across every section of Component 3 (AO3 and AO4).

What this dot point is asking

Across every section of Component 3 you answer as a theatre maker in one of three roles: performer, director or designer. This dot point sets out what each role does and how to write about it. The unifying rule, whatever the role, is to make a specific choice and justify it by its effect on an audience. This is the single most important skill in the written paper, and it earns both AO3 (how theatre is made and performed) and AO4 (analysis and justification).

The answer

The whole written paper rests on one idea: theatre is choices made for an audience. Knowing the play is not enough; you must turn it into staging from the point of view of a maker. The three roles give you the vocabulary, and the audience effect gives every choice its purpose.

The performer

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

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

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.

The rule that runs through all three

Examples in context

The same moment in three roles. 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. As a designer, you might let a warm light cool to a hard, single side light across the moment and bring in a low, sustained note on the sound design, so the audience feels the warmth drain from the scene. The three roles describe different choices, but each follows the same method (a specific choice plus its audience effect) and together they would make one coherent, layered moment, which is exactly what the exam rewards.

Try this

Q1. Name the three theatre-maker roles you may be asked to write as. [2 marks]

• Cue. Performer, director and designer.

Q2. Give one specific choice for the same moment in each role. [3 marks]

• Cue. Performer: a named vocal or physical choice (for example a two-second pause). Director: a spatial choice (for example placing the characters far apart). Designer: a set, costume, lighting or sound choice (for example a cold side light), each with its effect.

Q3. 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]

• What the marker wants. Distinct, accurate choices for each role anchored in a precise moment, each justified by its effect on the audience, with an awareness that the roles interlock to make one coherent moment (AO3 and AO4).

A note on the roles

This guide is AI-written and not individually human-reviewed. The roles you may answer as, and the balance between them, are set by WJEC and reviewed periodically. Always confirm the current Component 3 question styles against the WJEC specification at wjec.co.uk.