Book Reviews: AQA A Level Drama Play Guides: Antigone, Hedda Gabler

Practical study guides that provide clear synopses, context and production history

These shiny, A4-size books are a welcome addition to a series in which guides to The Glass Menagerie and Our Country's Good have already been published. All four titles are by Annie Fox, who has been an actor, head of drama in a state comprehensive school and trainer of drama teachers, so she knows what she is talking about.

Each book is presented in three sections: How to explore a text for A Level Drama, a detailed analytical study of the text, and advice about examination preparation and writing answers. The first of these is generic and common to both books before you get down to the specific text.

Thus, when you're exploring a scene (in any play) you might write character biographies, sketch the set and costumes, and choose key lines, among other things. And you need to understand that your understanding of its context will affect your practical decisions about the play.

The scene-by-scene synopsis of the play in question, which follows, is useful as long as no student tries to use it as a substitute for reading the text. Key terms are glossed (antagonist, motif, scribe, foreshadow, and so on). Practical activity suggestions, quotes from theatre makers and tips come in different colour side-boxes.

I like the focus on back-story exploration, such as the previous relationship between Mrs Elvsted and Hedda, or Ismene's role as a foil for Antigone. And in both books there is helpful information to help the student understand the play's context which is likely to be pretty remote from 21st-century teenage experience.

There is plenty of reference to production history, and interesting photographs such as Regine Vital as Antigone in Flat Earth's 2018 production, and Peter Eyre and Glenda Jackson as Tessman and Hedda for the RSC in 1975.

Happily the exam question section is useful but brief. These books are about getting inside a play and learning and developing creatively though that process. If you do that fully then the exam will more or less look after itself. It should not be what drives all the teaching and thinking.

It's odd that the playwright's name does not appear on the cover in either case, although I'm glad that Annie Fox's does because writers of study guides are often marginalised.