This page lists what we actually have for AQA GCSE Drama 8261. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Revising for a paper that has the text in the room
Component 1 is written and open book. A candidate may bring a clean, unannotated copy of the set play, and the extract Section B asks about is printed on the paper anyway.
Departments know this and students often do not act on it. They revise Drama the way they revise Literature, by learning quotations, and then sit an exam where the quotations were available all along and the marks were for something else.
What the paper actually rewards is fluency in the language of theatre-making. Section A is four multiple-choice questions on roles and terminology. Section B wants staging, design and performance decisions justified against a text the student can see. Section C wants an evaluation of a live production in the same vocabulary.
None of that is memory work. All of it is the sort of thing a short activity can rehearse.
Four activities do the vocabulary directly: the characteristics of performance texts, vocal and physical interpretation, staging configurations and stage positioning, and design fundamentals across set, costume, lighting and sound. The roles and responsibilities activity covers Section A's territory and is the one to set before a mock, because four marks for terminology is four marks nobody should be losing.
The Crucible, and the rotation behind it
Two activities are about the set play: The Crucible in context with the question styles it attracts, and The Crucible in design and performance interpretation.
AQA offers a list of set plays and that list has already rotated once. We chose The Crucible as the most widely taught. If your department teaches a different play, those two activities are about someone else's text, and the other nine are not.
That is a better ratio than most option-based subjects manage, because the majority of this specification's written content is about theatre rather than about a particular play.
The production only your students saw
Section C is worth thirty-two marks and asks about a live production the candidate has seen. Like fieldwork in Geography or the citizenship action in Citizenship Studies, it is not revisable in the ordinary sense.
Two activities go at the half that generalises. Evaluating live theatre: a transferable framework gives an order for writing about any production: what was intended, what was done, what effect it had, and how you know. Live performance statement requirements covers what AQA expects the candidate to have recorded and what the question will ask for.
A useful thing to know: the play answered on in Section B cannot be the production discussed in Section C, so a department taking a class to see The Crucible has to plan around that.
The devising log
Component 2 is non-exam assessment, and alongside the devised performance AQA assesses a written log.
One activity covers its structure and the acceptable formats. It is the sort of administrative knowledge that costs marks quietly, and it is worth setting at the start of the devising process rather than the end.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
Edexcel GCSE Drama covers the other board's course, which has its own set of written rules that students can breach without noticing.
What this page does not do
Nothing for the performance work, which is most of the qualification's practical weight.
Nothing for set plays other than The Crucible.
It does not evaluate a production for your students. The framework is here; the theatre trip is yours.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.