Have you ever written a class-room play? One way of doing it is to choose a story known to you all, a ballad or a fable or an event in history, and then to decide on the characters you will need to tell that story. Another way is to choose a number of characters and to bring them together in a story. Which ever way you decide on, you will need a group of sufficient people to play all the characters (you may find that some can be doubled) with two or three additional people if possible to be responsible for costume, properties, scenery and, most essential of all, to act as producer. For there must be someone who is not actually in the play who can ‘sit outside’ and criticise what you say, the way you say it, how you move and act, and so on.

It is not necessary, as many people seem to think, to begin with the written play, the script. Indeed, the play which you will read in this section, composed by children of your age, did not appear on paper until after it had been performed at a Drama Festival. Every member of the cast knew the plot thoroughly, and knew also exactly what type of character he and everyone else in the cast was intended to be. As a result if anyone introduced new words or new ideas in the course of a rehearsal or even a performance, no one was in the least put out, because the actors replied as their characters would have replied. You may not like to work entirely without a written script, but I would recommend that at least you begin that way until your play has taken shape.

These children decided to choose the second method. They took well-known historical and nursery rhyme characters and wrote their play around them.