A teaching folder created specifically for the new Edexcel 2016 specification.

This folder will enable you to practically and theoretically explore the play in the light of your chosen practitioner and will provide you with a comprehensive set of resources to help students to develop their own production concept of Lysistrata. The folder covers the play section by section with teaching suggestions (and accompanying handouts) provided for the entire play so that your students will develop an integral understanding of the text as a whole in order to interpret it for a contemporary audience.

All ideas and handouts focus upon the play from the role of a director (creating a production for a 21st century audience) and will provide students with detailed resources to help in their research of the play's original performance conditions, and the social, historical and cultural factors that are central to the context of the original text as well as the original aims and intentions of the playwright.

It will encourage students to develop their own production concepts and directorial interpretations and have a firm idea of their intended audience and an appropriate theatrical venue/space, as well as considering how the use of design elements might help to communicate ideas to an audience. The teaching suggestions will focus upon the acting style of key roles including the use of characterisation, vocal expression and movement, ways in which the playwright has structured the text. The folder will help you to explore, in detail, elements such as plot, language, form, structure, characterisation and stage directions and how students will use these in their directorial concepts.

Just some of the points of focus:
-Choral odes, exploration of the role of the Greek chorus and its use as a structural and commentary device
-Power and status within Athenian society as well as the shifting power between men and women within the play
-Political and social messages of the play
-Strong female characters
-Comedy and the traditions of Old Comedy
-Analysis of Lysistrata: exploring various interpretations of this character (hero, feminist, leader, egotist etc.)
-Greek theatrical traditions and how these transfer to theatre today
And many more....