Exam Practice: Performer, Director and Designer
This is your last set-play lesson, and the job now is different from the others. You already know the story, the characters, the themes and the play’s form. Now you practise turning that knowledge into exam answers: an open book paper, a printed extract from A Taste of Honey in front of you, and questions that ask you to think as a performer, a designer, or both at once.
Reading the Extract Like an Examiner
The written paper prints one extract from your set play. You answer questions about that extract, but you are expected to draw on knowledge of the whole play wherever a question demands it. You cannot simply describe what is happening in the printed lines — you need to place the extract inside the play’s full shape: which act, which scene, what has just happened, and what is about to happen. If the extract is the row in Act Two Scene One, you should be ready to explain that Helen has come at Geof’s invitation, that Peter arrives drunk moments later and takes back the money Helen left, and that this scene marks the point where Jo’s improvised household with Geof is placed under direct threat.
The written paper always includes one compulsory short question linking a design choice to social, cultural or historical context, or to theatrical conventions. For A Taste of Honey, that means being ready to connect a lighting, sound, set or costume choice to Salford poverty, the fact that, although the Wolfenden Report of 1957 had recommended decriminalisation, sex between men was still a criminal offence in 1958 and remained so until the Sexual Offences Act 1967, or the fact the play opened just months before the Notting Hill riots of 1958.
Performer Choices: Vocal and Physical, Anchored to a Moment
A performer question always asks you to work from a named moment, not the play in general. Take the final moment of the play: Jo is alone, Helen has just left to get a drink, and Geof has already gone for good without Jo knowing it. A strong answer names a vocal choice and a physical choice and states the effect of each. Vocally, you might choose a soft, unhurried pace as Jo recites the rhyme — “she looks round the room, smiling a little to herself” — suggesting she is drawing comfort from a private memory rather than performing grief for an audience. Physically, you might block her crossing slowly from the doorpost towards the centre of the room, her proxemic distance from the door widening as she stops watching for Helen’s return, her shoulders dropping as tension leaves her body.
Justify every choice by naming its effect on the audience. Because the audience knows Geof has left for good and Jo does not, a performer playing Jo here carries dramatic irony: the calmer and more content she looks, the more painful her isolation becomes for anyone watching. A vague answer says “she looks happy”; a strong answer says her calm, private smile makes the audience feel her isolation more sharply, because we know what she does not.
Suppose the extract printed is the row in Act Two Scene One, where Helen mocks Geof and insinuates that his living arrangement with Jo is improper. Answering as a performer, you might have Helen deliver her lines at a fast, needling pace, landing hard on the insults, while stepping closer into Geof’s space each time she speaks — physically crowding him out of the household he has built. Geof’s performer choice could be the opposite: a quiet, controlled voice and real stillness, refusing to match her volume, so the audience reads his restraint as dignity rather than weakness.
Answering the same moment as a designer, you might choose a lighting state that narrows as the row escalates — a general wash dimming to a tight special on Helen and Geof, closing in the visual space the way her words close in on him — and a sound design that removes any underscore entirely, so every insult lands in silence, with only a chair scraping or a door catching to break the quiet. Naming the lantern and the intended effect turns a generic idea into a concrete, markable answer.
Designer Choices: Naming the Element, Naming the Effect
Design questions reward named elements, not adjectives. Take the opening of Act One Scene One: Jo and Helen arrive at a freezing, comfortless flat with a broken gas fire, a single harsh light bulb, and a view over a slaughterhouse, with a tugboat horn sounding in the distance. A designer answer should name a specific set choice — damp-stained wallpaper and a single sagging armchair, rather than “a poor flat” — a specific lighting choice — an unshaded practical bulb hung low, casting hard shadows upward, rather than “harsh lighting” — and a specific sound choice — a distant tugboat horn and a low industrial hum fading in as the lights rise, rather than “sad sound”. Each choice should then be tied to an effect: the audience should feel the cold, the poverty and the sense of being trapped near an industrial edge of the city before Jo says a word.
Costume design can carry meaning across the whole play. Jo might wear a thin, ill-fitting coat in Act One that visibly fails to keep out the cold, contrasted in Act Two Scene Two with a home-made maternity dress that Geof has fitted carefully to her changing body — a costume choice that makes his care visible without a single line of dialogue. Helen’s costume could shift from a cheap, mismatched outfit in Act One to something borrowed or ill-fitting when she returns with her luggage in the final scene, signalling that her marriage to Peter has left her with nothing, whatever she claims.
Every strong performer or designer answer names the specific choice — the lantern, the fabric, the vocal pace, the proxemic distance — and states its effect on the audience at that exact moment. “Dark lighting” and “sad music” describe nothing; a tight special narrowing on two performers as an argument escalates describes a directorial decision.
Configuration: How the Staging Shape Changes Meaning
The play’s set is a single composite set holding the flat and the street, and Delaney gives very little further stage direction, leaving the configuration open to the director. In a thrust stage, the cramped flat can feel inescapable — audience members on the side seats effectively become part of the room, watching Jo and Helen argue at close range with no fourth wall to hide behind. In a proscenium arch staging, the same flat is framed and distanced, more like looking through a window into someone else’s poverty; this can suit Helen’s direct address to the audience, since a single, unified sightline to the front lets her asides land cleanly on everyone at once. Naming the configuration and explaining what changes for the audience is a useful way to link a design decision to theatrical conventions, which is what the compulsory short answer question asks you to do.
The Extended Staging Response: Directing a Whole Extract
An extended staging question asks you to direct a longer passage of the play, weighing performer and design choices together and reaching a judgement about how the whole moment should work. Take the wedding-day section of Act One Scene Two, when Helen tells Jo about her father before leaving for her wedding. A full answer moves between disciplines: a performer choice for Helen (a suddenly softer, faster delivery as old guilt surfaces, undercutting her usual sharpness), a performer choice for Jo (stillness, a held breath, physical shock rather than a big reaction), a lighting choice (a slow cross-fade from a bright, busy wedding-morning state to a single, dimmer special on the two women as the confession lands), and a sound choice (the wedding bells that marked the time jump to the wedding day fading out entirely at the moment of revelation, so the domestic and the public worlds separate). A substantiated judgement then says which choice matters most and why.
When you reach the final part of an extended answer, do not just list more choices — weigh them. Ask which single choice, if removed, would most change what the audience understands. For the row in Act Two Scene One, you might argue that removing the sound design’s silence, replacing it with sad underscore, would blunt the play’s cruelty, because music would soften insults that Delaney’s dialogue leaves raw and unaccompanied.
For the closing moment, you might argue that the single most important choice is Jo’s physical stillness rather than the lighting: however the lighting is designed, if the performer plays the recitation with agitation instead of calm, the audience loses the dramatic irony of a woman finding comfort in a private memory while unknowingly alone. A convincing judgement always explains what would be lost, not just what would change.
Across all of these questions the discipline is the same: name the moment, name the choice, state the effect, and where the question asks for it, make a judgement between choices. Revise by working through each act and scene and drafting one performer choice and one designer choice for a moment you have not yet used — by the time you sit the paper, you should have more concrete choices ready than any single extract can use.