Lesson Plan One
Remind yourselves of and re read pages 4-9 of the Faber edition of the play (the first five pages of the text at the start of Act One). Take roles and read the passage aloud, or in groups with one member of the group reading the stage directions and others (if there are more than three) offering constructive criticism of the performance. Look especially hard at the implications of the third of these tasks as you do this.
The central question here is what are your first impressions of Roelf in this passage? How much of what he says here helps us to understand the ways in which the play is developed? And how much of it predicates the end?
Starter Activity
Look again at the long stage direction with which the scene opens. ‘It is an image of desolate finality’. How do the images in the passage contribute to that picture? What is their individual and collective effect?
Make your own individual list of points and then discuss in the class/ group. Make sure you have recorded at least the five most significant points. Make sure that you record your responses.
- The images are all reversals of what, for Roelf and his kind, is natural, fruitful and attractive.
- It is ‘rocky and weed choked’: nothing which might support the local inhabitants will grow here.
- Only a few of the graves are marked with nameboard or a cross: most are anonymous, nameless, the graves of unknown, unclaimed paupers.
- Even in death they are subject to the predatory forces of nature, as in life they were also, and worse, the predatory forces of man.
- They are junk, like the post-industrial detritus Simon uses to try and protect their burial places.
- They mark out and define the wire fence and squatter camp, just as they define the graveyard.
Note carefully that the centrality of the burial motif is stressed from the outset. It becomes increasingly…
