Downstage Drama

Recently, I’ve seen and heard a lot of praise for the hit Netflix show, Adolescence, the majority of which seeming to be about the actors performing in one take. The show is brilliant and the actors are incredibly resilient and talented. And, whilst it’s not a perfect equivalent, I can’t help finding parallels between this type of screen acting and theatre in general. Every hour-long episode of Adolescence is performed in one shot, start to finish, with patience and planning making up for the much easier technique of hidden cuts or multiple cameras. The cast and crew must perform and be “switched on” every time they film the episode. If they lose focus for a second, the take is ruined.  It’s also a lot of lines and blocking to learn - mistakes can’t just be reset or edited out! In fact, in episode 3, a mistake is left in, where Owen Cooper, playing Jamie, yawned in the middle of a conversation. Erin Doherty, playing Briony, then improvised, asking “Am I boring you?”. It added a ve...

As both a Drama and English Language student, I read a lot of plays and study a lot of words, grammar, spellings and punctuation. I find these two subjects fascinating in their own right: plays have the power to creatively inspire the reader, audience and the professionals who will be bringing it to life, and the English Language provides the tools for the playwright to actually do this.  We’ve been exposed to a lot of prescriptivist media lately, article after article complaining about ‘the decline of our language” or how “the youth of today are abandoning the rules of English”. As a student, I’m required to take a more descriptive approach, which encourages one to observe how English is changing, rather than prevent it. But I don’t have this attitude just because I’m told to. I believe that the idea that English has certain rules (which inherently are all rooted in classism) is ridiculous . Because plays break these rules in every creative, theatrical choice the playwright makes....