Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

I remember when drama wasn’t something squeezed into an end-of-term production slot or a “practical enrichment” box on the timetable.  It was part of English, right there in the Key Stage 3 curriculum, alongside metaphors, Macbeth, and the Year 8 class jumping off the ends of their desks as Icarus tested his wings.  (Apologies to the Head whose office was below my classroom.)

The Faction’s The Talented Mr Ripley is currently in Brighton and touring across the UK in the coming weeks.  It’s definitely worth an evening of your time - slick, unsettling, and fiendishly clever theatre that lingers long after the lights go up.  I’ll be keeping an eye on whatever this company does next.

There’s something about a Renaissance man with a God complex that just won’t die.  Whether he’s summoning devils (Doctor Faustus), murdering kings (Macbeth), or designing a theocracy under the guise of morality (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Commander), you can practically hear the self-belief whirring.  The centuries change, the tights become trousers, but the hubris?  Eternal.

Free Masterclass: Tuesday 28 October, 6pm (UK): a free 30-minute masterclass to kick things off. If your teenager is muttering about daggers, witches, and the general futility of existence, it’s not just adolescence. Well, it could be. But it’s also Macbeth season.

Six - The hype machine tells us something is unmissable, revolutionary, the Next Big Thing.  Sometimes it is.  Often it isn’t.  Sometimes it’s just… fine.  And sometimes, whisper it, you might actually dislike the Very Important Cultural Moment everyone else is queueing for.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is uncomfortably relevant. An intelligent man - a scholar, no less - trades his soul for limitless knowledge and twenty-four years of supremacy. In our world, the Mephistophelean pact isn’t written in blood but coded in algorithms.

If you’ve been anywhere near a Drama teacher’s social media feed the last couple of days, you’ll know it’s not pretty.  Instagram stories and Facebook groups are awash with exhausted posts from teachers swapping horror stories of grades torn down by moderation, and wondering why they bother putting in hundreds of unpaid hours if the system’s going to kneecap them and their students anyway.