Text in performance: three key extracts

A student asks: 'Do I have to write my own play for Making Theatre, and does all my practical work get assessed?' How do you answer?

1. 01Address the source material

   No - Making Theatre uses existing published plays: you take three extracts from three different plays, so you interpret writing rather than devising your own.

2. 02Address the exploration

   You explore all three extracts practically, but this exploration is preparation and development - it builds your understanding and range.

3. 03Address what is assessed

   The formally assessed practical piece is the realisation of ONE extract (conventionally the third), performed or designed in the style of a prescribed practitioner and marked by an AQA examiner.

4. 04Add the written element

   That realisation is supported by a reflective report analysing and evaluating your development across the component - so both a practical realisation and a piece of reflective writing are assessed.

Result: The student learns that Component 3 interprets three published extracts, formally assesses the realisation of one in a practitioner's style plus a reflective report - clarifying the component's structure and what counts.

A group wants to realise their final extract in a physical-theatre style influenced by Frantic Assembly. How might they choose three contrasting extracts?

1. 01Choose for period contrast

   Pick one extract from an older play - say a Greek tragedy - for its scale, chorus and heightened situation, giving practice in classical demands.

2. 02Choose for genre contrast

   Pick a second from a modern naturalistic drama, contrasting in genre and demanding truthful, detailed, psychologically real performance.

3. 03Choose the final extract for the practitioner

   Pick a third with strong physical and visual storytelling potential - an emotionally charged, movement-friendly modern scene - so it suits realisation in a physical, Frantic Assembly-influenced style.

4. 04Check the set works together

   Confirm the three genuinely contrast (classical / naturalistic / physical) yet form a coherent, deliberate spread, and that the final one clearly fits the chosen practitioner.

Result: The group builds a set that contrasts in period, genre and style while pointing the final extract at their chosen physical-theatre method - showing how deliberate selection sets up the whole component.

Your group has an extract from a modern naturalistic play about a tense family meal. How do you explore it practically?

1. 01Understand text and context

   Read closely for the situation and the buried tensions, and research the play, its period and its naturalistic style so you know what truthful world you are creating.

2. 02Explore as a performer

   On your feet, improvise around the given circumstances, test each character's objective and subtext, and find the status shifts and small physical behaviours a real, loaded meal would produce.

3. 03Explore staging and design

   Try arrangements of the table and the space to make the tensions visible, and test how lighting and sound - a naturalistic domestic warmth, an underlying quiet - shape the atmosphere.

4. 04Reflect and record

   Note what the exploration revealed - which subtextual choices landed, which staging made the tension legible, what a naturalistic method demanded - as material for the reflective report.

Result: The extract is explored actively from every viewpoint and reflected on - discovering how the naturalistic scene plays and gathering report material - the investigative practical work the component rewards.

Your group has explored a classical tragedy extract in several ways and must now commit to an interpretation to realise in a physical-theatre style. How do you decide?

1. 01Choose the reading

   Settle on what you want the extract to mean and make the audience feel - say, the crushing weight of fate on the protagonist - so there is one clear interpretive idea.

2. 02Let the practitioner focus it

   Interpret it through your physical-theatre method: tell the story through ensemble movement, using the body and shared images to embody the sense of inescapable fate.

3. 03Make the choices specific

   Turn the idea into concrete choices - a chorus that physically presses in on the protagonist, a repeated movement motif, a soundscape that builds - each serving the reading.

4. 04Check coherence and roots

   Confirm the choices all express the one interpretation and grow from the text's actual situation, so the realised extract is a unified, defensible physical reading.

Result: Exploration is committed into one coherent, text-rooted interpretation focused by the physical-theatre method and realised through specific choices - the decisive interpretive work that produces a realised extract.

A group has explored three extracts: a classical tragedy, a naturalistic modern scene, and a physically expressive modern extract. They intend a physical-theatre realisation. Which should they realise, and how should they prepare it?

1. 01Match extract to practitioner

   The physically expressive modern extract best suits a physical-theatre style, so it offers the strongest fit between the material and the intended method.

2. 02Weigh the demonstration of skill

   Check that this extract lets the group show their range and skills fully and offers a real interpretive challenge, not just an easy fit - confirming it is the richest choice.

3. 03Prepare the interpretation

   Rehearse the committed physical interpretation until it is secure and consistent, refining the movement, images and timing so the reading is clear and polished.

4. 04Integrate and secure

   Make the physical-theatre method unmistakably visible, run technical and dress rehearsals to integrate any design and timing, and rehearse for a reliable single assessed showing.

Result: The group selects the extract that best matches their practitioner and demonstrates their skill, then prepares it to a polished, style-clear, reliably deliverable realisation - the deliberate selection and preparation the component rewards.