MATSEC SEC Theatre cheat sheet
MATSEC SEC Theatre · Keep the key ideas within reach.
Theatre Studies (SEC syllabus content)
Theatre is a live, collaborative art form: a performance exists only in the shared time and space of performers and audience, and is recreated at each performance rather than fixed like a film.
The three basic elements of theatre are the actor (the performer who creates character), the audience (those who watch and respond), and the space (the place where performance happens); text, director, design and technical elements are added layers.
Drama is the written script; theatre is the realised performance. A play text is a blueprint that directors, actors and designers interpret, so the same script can yield radically different productions.
Genre categories required for SEC study include tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, farce, melodrama and musical theatre; genre is identified by the play's ending, tone, social status of characters and intended audience response.
Tragedy: a protagonist of high status falls through a combination of fate, character flaw (hamartia) and circumstance; the audience experiences pity and fear (catharsis) and the ending is usually death or ruin.
Comedy: a protagonist of lower or ordinary status moves from confusion or obstruction toward reconciliation, marriage or restoration of order; comedy depends on timing, incongruity and the exposure of folly.
Theatre conventions are agreed rules the audience accepts as real within the performance (soliloquy, aside, chorus, direct address, doubling of roles, non-naturalistic staging); breaking a convention deliberately is a stylistic choice, not an error.
Dramatic structure follows exposition, rising action with complication, climax or turning point, falling action and resolution; Freytag's pyramid is a descriptive model, not a rule every play obeys.
Theatre history periods to know: Ancient Greek (5th century BCE, amphitheatres, masks, chorus), Roman, medieval mystery and morality plays, Italian commedia dell'arte, Elizabethan/Jacobean, French neoclassicism, Restoration comedy, Realism/Naturalism (late 19th century), and 20th-century modernism and physical theatre.
Realism aims to show recognisable everyday life with plausible psychology, fourth-wall staging and naturalistic dialogue; Naturalism is an extreme form emphasising heredity and environment, associated with Zola and Strindberg.
A production concept is the unifying interpretation a director applies to a script (period, setting, style, casting logic); it must be justified by evidence in the text rather than imposed arbitrarily.
Rehearsal process vocabulary: blocking (fixed stage movement and positions), staging, character motivation, given circumstances, objectives and super-objective (Stanislavski-derived terms), improvisation, and run-through.
Technical theatre roles: stage manager (runs the performance and calls cues), lighting designer, sound designer, set designer, costume designer, props master, and front-of-house; each role has distinct responsibilities within the production team.
Stage geography: stage right and stage left are from the performer's point of view facing the audience; upstage is away from the audience, downstage toward it; centre stage is the strongest acting position.
Lighting functions are visibility, focus (selective illumination), mood and atmosphere, time and place, and composition; lighting states are recorded as cues in the prompt book.
Sound in theatre covers live and recorded effects, reinforcement of voice, music as atmosphere or transition, and offstage sound that extends the world of the play beyond the set.
Set design choices are described by type (proscenium arch, thrust, in-the-round, traverse, black box) and by function: representing location, defining playing space, providing entrances and exits, and signalling period or style.
Costume communicates character status, occupation, period, personality and change of circumstance; quick changes and costume plots are practical documents in production.
Aristotle's six elements of drama, in order of importance as he ranks them: plot (mythos), character, thought, diction, song/melody and spectacle.
The critic's job in a review is to describe the production accurately, analyse how meaning was made, evaluate with evidence, and address the intended audience; a review is not a plot summary.
Playwrights' dialogue devices: monologue (one character speaking at length to others), soliloquy (alone on stage, revealing inner thought), aside (brief remark to the audience unheard by other characters), and subtext (meaning beneath the words).
A prompt book is the stage manager's master copy of the script containing blocking, cues and running order; it is the document that makes a performance repeatable.