Exam Practice: Performer, Director and Designer
From Notes to Exam Answers
You already know the story, the characters and the staging of Things I Know to Be True. The final skill is turning that knowledge into answers under exam conditions. The written paper is open book, so you can bring a clean copy of the play — but a clean copy only helps if you already know which moment to turn to and what to say about it. This lesson builds that muscle across the different question types you will meet.
The Shape of the Set-Play Questions
The set-play part of the written paper is marked out of 44. One extract from your play is printed in the paper, and you answer questions on that extract, referring to the whole play where the question requires it. There is a compulsory short answer question linking design and context and/or theatrical conventions, and one part gives you the choice of answering as a performer or as a designer. All students must be prepared to answer from a performer's perspective, so keep performer language ready even if you plan to take the designer option.
The set-play part of the paper is marked out of 44 and is based on one printed extract from your play. It includes a compulsory short answer question linking design and context and/or theatrical conventions, and one part that offers a choice of answering as either a performer or a designer. Every student must be ready to answer as a performer, whichever choice they make.
Naming the Moment, Then Designing It
A design-and-context answer is only as strong as the moment it names. Take the ceiling of roughly a hundred and thirty hanging bulbs designer Geoff Cobham hung above the Price family’s garden. On its own, “warm lighting” says nothing. Named precisely, it becomes an answer: the bulbs represent the small, contained world Bob has built for his family, because he has never travelled and has spent his working life inside one factory and one garden.
That design choice connects directly to context. Bob took redundancy at fifty-seven when his car factory closed, and admits “I find myself standing in the shed wondering what to do next.” A designer who knows this can justify the bulb-cave as more than decoration: it is the physical shape of a man’s retirement and his fear of a world beyond the garden fence.
A strong answer might read: “The garden set is deliberately naturalistic in its planting — a gum tree, rose bushes, a wading pool — but the fake roses and the artificial ceiling of bulbs make it stylised at the same time. This hybrid tells the audience the family’s world looks real but is built on illusion, which prepares us for Bob discovering the roses themselves are fake.”
Notice the structure: name the design element, name the technique or material, then state the effect on the audience and link it to context. That three-step pattern — element, technique, effect — is a reliable way to keep a design-and-context answer specific, whatever moment appears on your printed extract.
Choosing Performer or Designer
When a question offers a choice, pick whichever lens you can make more concrete for that specific moment. Take Mark arriving home soaked through in the storm, just before he tells his family he is moving away to transition. As a performer, you might choose a held breath before each sentence, shoulders drawn in, and a flattened, careful vocal tone that breaks only once — physical choices that show a person bracing for rejection. As a designer, you might choose a real water rig soaking the actor from above, combined with a low, sustained underscore that cuts to silence the instant he speaks, so the audience’s attention snaps onto the words rather than the storm.
Every performer or designer answer needs three things: a named moment, a named technique (a vocal quality, a lantern, a fabric, a lift), and a stated effect on the audience. Generic answers — “sad lighting”, “angry acting” — lose marks that concrete, named choices win.
Analysing the Playwright’s Intentions
Analysing intentions means asking why a choice exists, not just what it looks like. The moment when the whole family joins hands at the same instant — used first to give Rosie the strength to announce she is leaving for Brisbane, with her absent siblings conjured onto the stage around her, and then again before the family leaves for Fran’s funeral — began as a devised movement sequence and became a written stage direction. The intention behind it is to solve a problem words cannot: showing that a family scattered across cities and continents is still, instantly, connected. Analysing this well means naming both moments, explaining what each achieves emotionally, and noting that the writer let a piece of movement become part of the script itself.
The original production removed almost all fixed furniture, sliding tables and chairs on and off rather than leaving them set. The intention was to stop actors gravitating to a chair and letting the scene shrink around it, since a chair sitting still on stage can drain the energy from a moment.
That intention explains why Pip is staged sitting on the ground, not at a table, in the autumn scene where she tells her mother she is leaving her husband. Removing the furniture makes the moment feel exposed before Pip says a single word — the emptiness around her signals collapse.
Building the Extended Staging Response
The longest response asks you to direct a whole extract, weighing performer and design choices against each other and reaching a decision. Take the extract where Rosie arrives home unannounced and the whole family gathers. A strong response might stage the reunion using the Presumption of Weight technique in a hug sequence, with family members losing and regaining contact as Fran fusses over each child in turn, using a cross-fade from a cool travel-weary wash to a warm domestic one as Rosie steps into the garden.
A judgement question also expects you to weigh staging configurations. In a thrust configuration, the audience surrounds three sides of the reunion, making the family’s proxemics — who stands close, who hangs back — visible from every angle, which suits a play about a family constantly re-forming and separating. In a proscenium arch, the same staging is flattened into a single picture, which can make Bob’s isolation at the edge of the group easier to frame deliberately with a single spotlight, but harder for the audience to read from multiple sides.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Writing “the lighting would be dark and sad” describes a feeling, not a choice. A stronger answer names the lantern or state — a single downlight isolating Bob after the phone call, a slow cross-fade from warm amber to cold blue — and states exactly what that choice makes the audience feel or notice at that named moment. The same applies to performer answers: “he would act upset” earns little; a described vocal break, a specific posture, or a held silence earns more.