A practical approach to teaching Richard III at KS3The play’s long opening soliloquy is a challenging text for most young people to understand. Elsewhere on Stagework the actor Ian McKellen makes the task much more straightforward and even enjoyable. There are some examples of games that play with the language of the speech, give young people a feel for the words and develop confidence in speaking and listening to them. Essentially the technique employed is choric speech: the teacher prepares the class by dividing the soliloquy into bite-sized chunks, literally cutting up a photocopy of the text, numbering each section from first to last, jumbling them up, putting them all in a hat, and then asking the children to each pull out a line. That line then becomes ‘their’ text that they will learn through a series of games. Finally they put the fragments of text back together as a coherent whole. Once the young people have their individual lines/phrases of text, have them walk around the room, speaking the words aloud, all at the same time. If there are any words (and there will be some) that they can’t pronounce, encourage them to come to you whilst at the same time keeping the whole group moving and speaking. When you are satisfied that everyone can say their lines, and perhaps begin to memorise it (keep the extracts short – two lines at the most), you can play games with the language. For example, running and speaking , where the young people stand at one end of the room and, at a signal from you, they run, (or walk fast) one at a time, to the other end of the room. When they get there, they turn to face the way they have come and SHOUT their line as loud as they dare. Do this until everyone is standing at the far end of the room, and then repeat. Once you are confident that the young people more-or-less know their lines, bring them together in a circle and have them speak the lines one after another in the order in which they are written. Do this a couple of times, and then get them to walk and/or run around the room, and, at a signal from you, the child with the first line speaks/shouts “Now is the winter of our discontent…” The second picks it up from “…made glorious summer by this sun of York..” and so on until the end of the speech. When they (and you) are pretty tired from all the moving and speaking, get them together in a huddle and, this time, instead of shouting, ask them to shut their eyes, and, using a big stage whisper, launch the soliloquy from the first to the last line once again. Finally, have everyone sitting in a circle on the floor and, by using labels that you prepared earlier to hold up, get individuals to say their line(s), experimenting with different emphasis and expression triggered by your signs, eg. murderously, coldly, and powerfully. Produced by the National Theatre working with BT. | |  | Richard III: A practical approach to teaching Richard III at KS3
Introduction
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