Year 3 - The show must go on

Never before has this theatrical saying been so relevant to everyday life at the moment. Indeed the show has gone on over the past few months with our online learning and now we are all back in school, life is slowly returning back to some sort of ‘normal’ for the children.

We have so much to be thankful to the Ancient Greeks for - The Olympics, Medicine, Democracy, Pythagoras, even the Alarm clock!

This week in Topic we looked at another area that has its origins in Ancient Greece - The Theatre. We discovered that Ancient Greek theatre began as a religious ceremony, The religious rites for the ceremony were eventually written down and later became plays. Although the theatre originated in Athens it soon became popular in most city states in Greece. Most Greek cities had a theatre which was usually a bowl-shaped area in the open air.

There were three major types of plays:

Tragedy, Comedy and Satire (which was a mix of tragedy and comedy).

Greek actors were always men so they had to dress as women for any female roles. Due to this and also because of the numerous roles they had to play the Greeks wore a lot of masks, bright colours for comedy and dark colors for tragedy. The children designed their own Greek theatre masks as one of our activities, as well as designing their own Amphitheatres.

We also discovered that the audience would throw food and stones if they thought the acting wasn’t good enough! Thankfully, this behaviour has not continued into modern day!