New HL Paper 1 drama response

This week we have posted a new Higher Level student's response to an extract from Amy Ng's play Shangri-La.  It Is a very strong response overall as the student has an excellent awareness of the text as a work of drama and gives a detailed and insightful response to the guiding question. 

 

The inclusion of drama texts on Paper 1 is a recent development in the latest iteration of the course so there are not as many past paper examples of such extracts as the course before 2021 only included poetry and prose texts.  As such, we hope this extract, and others we will post, will prove useful at giving students practice in responding to drama texts.

As with any of the literary forms, it is important students understand the distinctive features of drama and comment on these in their analysis and evaluation. Drama texts come with their own set of challenges due to the fact that, unlike the other genres, a play text is not the final outcome of its author's craft - that is, of course, the actual performance of the play before an audience.  

Therefore, the explicit study of drama as a literaty form, how dramatic conventions work in practice, and how an audience is invited to 'read' the play on a stage needs to be included as part of the course so that students are prepared to analyse and interpret drama texts by the time they get to their final examinations.  

This student demonstrates a sophisticated appreciation of how drama can work in performance for an audience.  The guiding question does point them in the right direction but this level of response and the appreciation of dramatic conventions and effects is the outcome of time spent studying drama as a literary form.

The new sample, and all others can be found at the page linked below, where responses are organised by literary form. This sample, number 18, can be found in the  Responses to drama section, also linked below.