IB Diploma Programme Theatre SL (first assessment 2024; current guide). The production proposal is shared by SL and HL (30% at SL): choose a published play text not previously studied and formulate a vision for the design and theoretical staging of the ENTIRE play for an audience, presented as a proposal of at most 12 pages with written text not exceeding 4 000 words. This handout teaches reading a play as a THEATRE-MAKER: from text to vision to proposal. The worked examples use an imagined staging of a classic realist text, with all design decisions original.

Must-know for the production proposal:

A play text is not literature on legs: it is a score 剧本谱 for performance. The theatre-maker's read asks what the play DEMANDS: the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES (the facts the text fixes — time, place, relations), the spine 主线 (the single through-line of the protagonist's want), the ACTION UNITS (beats where want meets obstacle and changes), and the WORLD of the play (its rules, its atmosphere, what it costs to live there). Alongside the academic read runs the embodied 具身的 read the guide insists on: standing the key relationships up, walking the space, testing the text aloud: knowledge that resides in the body, the course's founding principle. From the read comes the question the proposal answers: what is THIS production's play about — not the play in general, but this staging's argument, held in one sentence.

Worked example. In a naturalist family drama the read finds: the given circumstance of a mortgaged house; the spine — the daughter's fight to leave; units that each strip her of an ally; a world where love is currency. One-sentence argument: “this staging shows a family eating its young to keep its house.” Every design choice below answers to that sentence.

the concept 概念 is one governing idea that ties every choice: not a decorative theme (“loneliness”) but a performance argument (“the room shrinks as each daughter leaves”). Test a concept by its yield: how it stages the opening, the turning point and the ending — a concept that cannot stage the ending is a mood, not a concept. The design areas each serve it: the set 布景 (the room's shrinking is built — walls that track in per act); Costume 服装 (period held but fading — the family dresses in its own past); Light 灯光 (naturalism narrowing to a lamp's circle — safety shrinking with the space); Sound 音效 (the house's own noises rising as people leave); Space 空间 (end-on and proscenium for the fourth wall, or a traverse for entrapment — the audience as witnesses who cannot intervene).

The audience 观众 is a design material: where they sit decides what they are (fourth-wall voyeurs, trapped traverse witnesses, promenade ghosts). The moment architecture carries the vision: choose THREE moments to plan in the proposal's detail — typically the opening image (which states the world in silence), the pivot (where the spine turns), and the final image (which lands the argument) — and let every other choice be inferred from them.

Worked example, continued. The opening image: the family eats at a table filling the stage, walls wide. The pivot: the daughter stands; the lamp is the only light; the walls have halved the room. The final image: she is out; the parents face the table in a pool the size of a plate. The concept stages its sentence in three pictures, and the proposal's reader can SEE the production.

The document (≤ 4 000 words, ≤ 12 pages of text and images) is judged on how the vision informs EVERY choice: structure it as (1) the play and its world, briefly — the reader knows the play; (2) the concept, stated in the one sentence and unpacked; (3) the three moments, each with its staging and design; (4) the design areas, each tied to the concept in a line; (5) the audience's position — literally and thematically. Justify by RETURNING to the concept: a choice unexplained reads as taste; a choice explained from the concept reads as direction. The images serve the text (a sketch of the shrinking room), never decorate it. The classic failures: the literature essay (analysis where direction belongs), the mood board (pictures without an argument), and the concept drop (a strong sentence the pages never cash).

• The theatre-maker's read: given circumstances, spine, units, the world — plus the embodied read (reading).
• The concept: one performance argument, not a theme; tested against opening, pivot and ending (vision).
• The design areas, each serving the concept and each named: set, costume, light, sound, space (design).
• The audience as material: position decides role — fourth wall, traverse, promenade (audience).
• The document's five-part structure; justification always returning to the concept; images serving text (proposal).
• The worked staging's sentence, three moments and shrinking room understood (worked).

Boundary notes: the proposal is marked on the vision’s coherence and its informing of every choice - the examiner must be able to see the production from the page. All worked staging decisions are original.