The Road: Improving Standards in English through Drama at Key Stage 3 and GCSE

Joe Penhall’s screenplay for the film of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel provides a gripping and unforgettable text for use in English at Key Stage 4. The novel won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the the film starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron won praise for its faithful rendering of the novel’s dystopian vision.

This educational edition in Methuen Drama’s Critical Scripts series has been prepared by national Drama in Secondary English experts Ruth Moore and Paul Bunyan. Building on a decade of highly effective work and publications endorsed by national organisations and supported by teachers and consultants across Britain, each book in the series:

meets the new requirements at KS3 and GCSE (2010)

features detailed, structured schemes of work utilising drama approaches to improve literary and language analysis

places pupils’ understanding of the learning process at the heart of the activities

will help pupils to boost English GCSE success and develop high-level skills at KS3

will save teachers considerable time devising their own resources.

The Road is set a few years after an unexplained cataclysmic world disaster has left the earth barren and hostile. It follows a father and son as they struggle to survive in a landscape where men either starve or join the marauding gangs of cannibals. Readers are advised that there are some scenes of a disturbing nature.