Twelve Hours to Make It Epic
A Year 11 class has 12 contact hours to stage a 20-minute episodic script about a family evicted from a flat. The script has nine short scenes, fourteen speaking roles, four songs with placards, direct address to the audience and no fourth-wall illusion. Rehearsals are two 90-minute afternoons a week for four weeks in a studio 9 m by 7 m, with the performance on a proscenium stage in the school theatre. The cast of fourteen ranges from students with three years of youth-theatre experience to two who have never been on a stage. The director wants a Brechtian feel. The most recent run-through, before cuts, came in at 29 minutes: delivery is thoroughly naturalistic, characters speak to each other as if in a living room, and the placards are read out apologetically, as if the actors are embarrassed by them. Half the cast cannot hold a tune. The written exam will ask them to justify their stylistic choices.
1. Allocate the 12 hours across the four weeks. Justify the order of work and state clearly what you will not spend rehearsal time on.
Read the worked answer
Week 1 (3 hours): style before text. Read-through with only two questions asked of every scene: who is watching, and what is this scene for? Then ensemble and spatial work: the chorus line, the placard walk, the direct address position downstage. Block scenes 1 to 3. Reason: naturalistic habits are set in the first week; if you block first and stylise later, you spend weeks 3 and 4 undoing work.
Week 2 (3 hours): the middle. Block scenes 4 to 7, treat songs 1 and 2 as rhythmic speech before melody, design placards with the cast so they own the words.
Week 3 (3 hours): run and cut. Two runs of the whole piece, notes on transitions and direct address, then cut from 29 to 20 minutes by trimming repeated arguments and one song verse, not by speeding up delivery.
Week 4 (3 hours): two full runs with tech, one in the theatre, with a stopwatch and a stop-and-fix policy.
What I will not use time for: line-learning sessions (lines are learnt outside rehearsal), polishing emotional realism, or blocking every scene before the style is set. Twelve hours is 720 minutes; a class of fourteen gets roughly 50 minutes of individual attention each, so the time must buy decisions, not repetition.
2. Give two specific rehearsal exercises that would move the cast away from naturalism, and explain how each feeds the finished scene.
Read the worked answer
1. Speak the stage direction. An actor plays a line, then a third actor reads the stage direction aloud in the past tense ('He turns away and pockets the letter'), and the scene continues. This exposes the action as demonstration rather than as feeling, which is exactly the alienation effect the piece needs, and it gives the two inexperienced actors a concrete task instead of an instruction to 'be more real'. It feeds directly into scenes 3 and 6, where the landlord's gestures must read as social behaviour, not psychology.
2. Gestus freeze. At the end of each scene the cast builds a still image that summarises the social relationship, not the emotion, and captions it in five words. Then they replay the scene trying to arrive at that image. This makes power visible in the body and produces the placard captions from the cast's own language rather than from the teacher. It feeds the eviction scene, where the family's physical level relative to the bailiff is the whole argument.
Run both at low stakes, with no audience, in week 1. Then use the freeze as a reset in week 3 whenever a run slides back into the living room: stop, rebuild the image, restart from there. Do not explain Brecht to the cast before they have done it; the written exam justification can come afterwards, when they have physical evidence to describe.
3. The four songs are the weakest element and half the cast cannot sing. How do you stage them so nobody is exposed and the songs still do dramatic work?
Read the worked answer
Stop treating the songs as singing. In this style their job is commentary and interruption, and a confident shouted chorus lands better than a shy melody.
Practical plan.
- Convert each song to rhythmic speech over a single beat (a clap, a stamp, a table thump) at about 90 beats per minute.
- Split every line between three actors, so no one holds a note or a phrase alone; the line is passed like a rumour.
- Keep one tune-carrier, the strongest singer, upstage with the placards as a visible band, so the audience's eye goes to the words.
- Give the two least experienced cast members the placard-and-beat role permanently, and tell them this is a casting decision, not a consolation prize.
- Never stand the cast in a semicircle facing front, which is what makes non-singers look afraid; put them in a line along the front edge, moving on the beat.
Why it works. The risk is embarrassment, and embarrassment is contagious; a cast that is embarrassed by its own songs stops committing to the direct address as well. Rhythmic speech removes the exposure of pitch while keeping the exposure of opinion, which is the point.
Exam link. In the written paper, students can now justify the choice in the language of style: the songs comment on the action rather than illustrate feeling, and the split lines keep the audience thinking about the group, not the individual voice.