I have a confession to make. Although I am a fan of Splendid and have taught them as a style, a practitioner and used their resources to teach other texts and skills… I have tragically never seen them live. It's on my wish list! I have been looking at five A4 laminated sturdy posters with big bold centre titles and carefully planned colour schemes. They’re mainly black and white with just enough bright colour to make each one sing. They are on Macbeth, Live Theatre, Splendid, Boal and Elizabethan Theatre – all in Kerry Frampton's characteristic attractive style.
They are wonderful, and I would go for the biggest you can afford for most flexibility – they come in three sizes, A4, A3 and A2. With eighteen to choose from, they are added to periodically, and have a wide range, taking in practitioners, techniques, theatre history and a couple on plays – Macbeth and Woyzeck.
How to describe the poster's aesthetic? Dense, but not over-fussy, gloriously attractive, passionate about theatre, deeply complex but with an accessible look. The headlines draw you in and there is both high level vocabulary – symbolic, Hecate, introspection – and enough everyday language to help learners infer meaning. Not a millimetre is wasted. Even the border is informative with quotes and definitions. The images make references to plays and themes with beautiful detail.
These mindmaps are excellent for learning. They’re great teaching and revision resources for GCSE and above, and some would be fab for KS3, depending on your schemes and school.