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How do you go about evaluating your own work? When you’re creating drama it’s very important to evaluate your work as you go along. This means that you have control over its quality and can adapt and change things as necessary. You need to be honest about what works and what could be improved. Having a clear aim in mind will help you check if you are on the right track. Always consider what you’re trying to achieve. If you need to write about the process of creating drama, making notes as you go along will help. You will have a record of how your work developed in rehearsals.

Consider any key moments in developing the work that really shaped it or had an impact on it. These could be particular rehearsal techniques, such as hot-seating to develop characters or improvised work that generated content. Don’t just list what you did, explain why you did it and the effect it had on the direction of your work. When you're writing about the development of your work, it’s a good idea to use any clear aims you have for your piece to assess your progress. For example:

We wanted to remind the audience of the emotional impact the crash had on the family so we decided to create a movement motif to represent it, a recurring physical theatre sequence. I realised this could be used effectively in transitions between the more naturalistic scenes. We experimented with performing the motif at varying speeds and with different levels of tension, such as a slow motion replay and a robotic interpretation. This ensured that the audience didn’t become bored and successfully communicated how the memory of the crash is forever present in the characters' lives.

Read these two evaluations of drama development. Which one do you think is best and why?

Evaluation one

The episodic nature of our drama meant that the audience saw a lot of different characters onstage. As new characters emerged it became confusing at times so I suggested we could overcome this by adding narration. Our monologues spoke directly to the audience about the characters and announced the next scene. We used the style of Epic theatre by deliberately coming out of role and narrating. This kept the audience less emotionally involved so more able to consider why the characters behaved as they did.

Evaluation two

We added monologues for each character that worked like narration. They told the audience about our characters and were used to announce the next scene. We did this because we had a lot of characters and this helped make it clearer who we were. Coming out of role worked well.

The first evaluation is much better than the second. It identifies an issue and then explains how the problem was overcome. It also details the impact the writer’s own ideas had on development of the drama. There is a clear aim in what they want the audience to feel and this is used to evaluate success. The second evaluation says what was done but gives little explanation as to why or what they were hoping to achieve. It is not enough just to say that something did or didn’t work; the important thing is why.