Choosing Your Production and Using Your Notes Allowance

The one part you decide in advance 🎟️

Everything else in this exam happens on the day. **This does not.** You choose which production to write about, and you are allowed to bring **up to 500 words of notes** you prepared yourself, attached to an official form. Which means the marks lost in this section are usually lost weeks earlier, quietly. By picking a production that gives you almost nothing to write about. By choosing a show that is not permitted at all. By spending 200 of your 500 words retelling the plot. This module is about those decisions. The writing itself, the analyse and evaluate registers, is a different module and is already built.

Five terms that decide what you can do 🗂️

These are administrative rather than dramatic, and getting them wrong costs more than any vocabulary error:

Which TWO could you NOT use? 🚫

Four productions, all invented for this module, all of which a class actually went to see. Select the TWO that could NOT be used for this section.

• A touring production of DNA
• "Salt and Silver", a new musical sung from beginning to end with no spoken dialogue
• "The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter", a new play with full set, costume, sound and lighting design
• "Two Chairs", a studio piece performed on a bare stage by two actors

The five criteria, in full ✅

There are five, and this is all of them. Check a production against the list BEFORE you book the ticket, not afterwards. **1. Not a Component 3 prescribed text.** Check your set-text list first. **2. Not sung-through in its entirety.** A production sung from start to finish is out. **3. A range of production elements.** Costume, set, sound and lighting. The more of them the production actually uses, the more you have to write about. **4. Opportunities to analyse and evaluate performers, directors AND designers.** The questions can ask about any of the three, so all three need to be visible in what you saw. **5. Opportunities to use subject-specific terminology.** If you cannot describe it in the vocabulary of the subject, it will not show what you know. **Criteria 3, 4 and 5 all point the same way**: a bigger, more designed production usually gives you more to work with than a stripped-back one, however good the stripped-back one was.

Match each criterion to what it means for you

Your 500 words, and what they are for 📝

The notes are pre-prepared, attached to the official **Appendix 2** form, and capped at **500 words**. They are not a second chance to write the essay: they are the material you cannot risk forgetting.

Your draft is too long 🔢

An interactive activity.

Which line goes first? ✂️

An interactive activity.

What shape are the questions? ❓

What can you safely expect from this section, and what can you not?

• Two questions: a shorter one asking you to analyse and a longer one asking you to evaluate, though the exact marks and focus can vary
• Exactly 6 marks for analysis and exactly 9 for evaluation, every year without fail
• One question, chosen from a list of options
• Two questions asking essentially the same thing, so one prepared answer covers both

Get the order right 🪜

An interactive activity.

Say it back 📋

The production you write about must not be a Component 3 _____ text, and must not be _____ in its entirety. You may take in up to _____ words of pre-prepared notes, attached to the official _____ form. Sketches and diagrams are allowed, but programmes and _____ are not.

Three decisions 🧭

An interactive activity.

Your turn ✍️

An interactive activity.