Grade 8 Acting: The Knowledge Section

A hand out for your students

The votes are in and Grade 8 Acting was a clear winner in the poll from earlier in the week, with 55% of the votes - you’ll find the handout at the bottom of this post.

Grade 7 Acting was next in line with 31% so I’ll be publishing that one soon.

The Grade 8 Acting Knowledge handout has been prepared with the following information in mind, that I received from LAMDA in response to the following email:

I wrote…

I have a query regarding Grade 8 Acting Knowledge.

4.1 Processes involved - can you confirm that the examiner will specify which one of the three characters they should discuss as per the new syllabus?

4.2 Role of character - will this be about the SAME character as 4.1 or could it be about a different character? 

The wording has changed for 4.1 and now says: “explain the processes involved in developing the character, including how the key themes and characteristics were effectively portrayed.” 

I assume this means the key themes of the play as a whole, and characteristics of the role portrayed. Can you explain how a student can portray a key theme? Let’s say a key theme of the play was “social responsibility”. How would a Learner portray this theme? If this means ‘key theme’ of the character (which doesn’t really make sense) how is this different from ‘characteristics’? 

And they replied….