Macbeth – the deadly plot

Another theatre workshop over the past two days, this time with a different focus: how to use Drama to enhance the teaching of English, specifically Shakespeare.  It meant a visit to another campus, LDA at Kanpur Road – I have no idea what the initials stand for.  It is the largest CMS campus, also the home campus of Mohit and Pankuri (who maintain a jocular rivalry for my attention.)  It is the first campus I ever visited, since it hosts the Odyssey festival.  Not that I reckoned a single thing, as the festival took place in the Conference Centre at the very front, with its pair  of large guesthouses, while I was directed to the huge school which lies behind it, with a separate entrance.

Teaching Macbeth had involved me in far more extensive research and preparation.  I had been given a choice of scenes to take as my raw material, and had selected Act 3, Scene 1, where Macbeth instructs the murderers to dispatch Banquo and his son.  I decided, if I was going to put the scene on its feet, that it needed a good modern translation for them to focus upon.  They did have access to the simultaneous original and AI generated “translation”, but it did not fit my purpose, and was largely based on textual references, so far as I could tell.  So I decided to write my own, sufficient to illustrate the key points of the scene, but (I hope)_also actable,  The AI version was clunky and riddled with mistakes, so they had set the bar low.

I was introduced to the class, who were the somewhat predictably, more or less the usual class of frightened rabbits, nervous about what was to come, and frightened of making a mistake.  A general theme of my teaching here has been to convince them that, in arts subjects, mistakes are not only inevitable but welcome, as a way of reinforcing learning.  This group were Year 11s, I believe, at the top of the tree.

After a chat designed to out them at their ease, as well as pointing to various aspects of Shakespearean theatre, we began with the usual game, and then straight into improvisation.  As with my teaching of Dream, I gave them all a rough scenario – a meeting of two people who were outwardly friendly, but both turned to the audience in asides to let us know their real feelings.  I encouraged them to speak in Hindi (fairly strictly forbidden throughout CMS) in order to put them at their ease – it is hard enough improvising, let alone in a different language.  It was interesting  that the first two groups to show their work both avoided Hindi.  And when the third group did do as I had suggested and performed their piece in Hindi, it was easily the best.

The next part of the pattern I seem to have stumbled upon is to give them a modern English translation of the scene.  Not the AI-generated one they all have access to in their books, (since, predictably, it is rubbish) but one that I write for them, which mirrors the text exactly  but without wandering into transliteration.  The scene was Act 3 Scene 1, where Macbeth engages the murderers, and called it The deadly plot. I performed this, as Macbeth, with Banquo played by Mohit, and Lady Macbeth (who had the one line in this scene) by Pankuri.  And you could tell that they were all gripped by it.  They then split into five groups and performed half the scene  – two the first half, two the second, and one an edited version of the whole thing.  Again, very successful.

The next day we moved on to  Shakespeare proper, and again I performed Macbeth.  I was desperately trying to avoid being like the PE teacher in the movie Kes, who is both ref and star striker, but they did need to understand that this could be performed and made understandable and exciting.  And all this was interspersed with talking about Shakespearean theatre, and different styles of production, and costume, and how to apply this knowledge in the exam, and anything else that came into my head, for there was very little planning on my part.

Finally, they performed short sections of the scene.  And all of them did this, some more confidently than others of course.  But every one of them, I am sure, gained a good deal from the two sessions.  They wrote post-its, at the instruction of Pankuri, so I saw what they had to say (though actually, the one I liked the most simply said Zip zap boeing (which was charming in itself.)