Drama strategy: Given Circumstances

Teaching ‘given circumstances’ not only helps students with their acting performance but also with empathy. Asking students to imagine what they would do under a certain set of given circumstances, and then what their character would do, broadens the mind and helps a person to put themselves in someone else's shoes.

What are given circumstances?

The term ‘given circumstances’ was coined by Konstantin Stanislavsky. Given circumstances refer to the environmental, historical, and situational conditions a character finds themselves in. For Stanislavsky, six questions make up a character's given circumstances:

• Who?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• For what reason?
• How?

Whether working on a script or an improvisation, listing a character's given circumstances is time well spent. Sometimes students worry about finding the ‘right answers’, but it's good to remind them that there can be many different interpretations and it's okay to go with their personal interpretation. Here are three activities to get you started when teaching given circumstances.

Packing a bag

Ask students to find a space in the room and to sit down on their own. The student imagines that they are packing a bag for an event; perhaps they are going on holiday, on a school trip, or travelling for a year, or even that they've been assigned to a spy mission. Explain that they can be any character they want, but they must know at least three of their given circumstances. For example, it's your first day at high school, you're in your tidy bedroom with everything neatly laid out on the sofa, and you have stomach cramps. Or you are running away from home, you are in a rush because you don't want your parents to find out, you have a headache, and your stuff is spread all over the room because you threw it all over the place in a rage.

Give the students a few minutes to mime packing their bags under a particular set of given circumstances and then ask them to try again with a brand-new set of circumstances. This can be done three or four times. This exercise can also be done with a real bag and real objects. It can be fun to ask students to get up and perform a solo scene based on this exercise.

Creating given circumstances for fairy-tale characters

Ask the students to think of one character from a fairy tale and a scene from the fairy tale featuring this character – for example, when Jack sells his cow Daisy, or when Snow White takes an apple from the disguised queen, or when the wolf talks to Little Red Riding Hood in the woods. Now ask the students to take that character and scene and to answer the following questions:

• What's the character's name?
• What are their hobbies?
• What don't they like?
• What are their favourite things?
• Do they have any enemies?
• How old are they?
• Where do they live?
• Who makes up their family?
• Do they have any friends?
• How have they found themselves in the situation they are in?
• What are their surroundings like at the moment?
• Are they cold, hot, hungry, in a rush or in any pain?

Explain before you begin that it's okay to make up the answers and that there is no right or wrong answer.

After students have gathered all of this information on their character, they can put it into practice. Ask them to create 5-minute improvisations in groups of three to four, using their characters. It's fun to have a group of characters from different fairy tales altogether, and this provides a good base for a new and unique improvisation.

This exercise can also be practised with a different set of characters. For an older, more advanced group, the same exercise as above could be done with Shakespearean characters, characters from novels, or characters from musicals.

Given circumstances and script work

Once given a script and a character to play, after the first read through, students can mine the play for everything that they can find about their character and list their given circumstances. Some plays will have more information about these than others.

Whatever is missing from the play, the actor will have to create themselves. Ask students to list all of the given circumstances given by the writer and the ones that they have created themselves. Once the students have all their given circumstances, you can hotseat them.

To do this, ask them to sit in character, while the teacher and other students ask them questions, such as what are their favourite foods? Do they have any siblings? Where did they grow up? Did they go to university? What makes them angry? and so on. This might draw attention to any missing given circumstances that they need to create.