I once saw an experienced visiting speaker give a lecture on Latin American politics in which he recalled how he’d hid in a morgue to evade a Guatemalan death squad. The story should have been relevant and gripping – but it somehow got lost in a swirl of unrelated material. Students tuned out.
We’ve been developing not just a remedy for such presentational weaknesses, but a refined lens on what the lecture can be – one rooted in the stagecraft of Tony Allen, the godfather of the alternative comedy movement. Allen’s influence was so pervasive that when he died in 2023, the elusive street artist Banksy penned his eulogy on BBC Radio 4’s Last Word.
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Allen’s book Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? identified six elements of comedic stagecraft, which he taught in the following order:
Dynamics: personalised engagement with the audience to create a unique experience.
Attitude: having an authentic voice, but punctuated for comic effect by self-doubt.
Material: drawing out your inner nerd by hyper-focusing on personal obsessions.
Structure: organising the delivery into satisfying patterns like the callback and rule of three.
Texture: developing a personal argot and deploying linguistic formulas like alliteration, metaphor and hyperbole.
Technique: the mastery of voice and gesture to create naturalistic set pieces.
Allen summed up his message as:
“Know your truth. Express yourself. Play this audience. Now.”
Students can acquire extraordinarily effective explanations for most academic topics online and, since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, even ask repeated questions to clarify misconceptions. But these technologies remain weak or even outright counterproductive for proactively engaging learners and giving them a sense of community. The lecture hall, more than ever, should be a place of communal excitement. It’s the one thing you can’t get on a computer.
So, let’s look at three of Allen’s elements and how we can apply them.
Dynamics
Many of us establish a connection with a class by simple things like adjusting the lighting at the front. But how about beginning from the back of the room and walking into a spotlight, as though delivering a soliloquy? Or giving task instructions in mime? Anything to avoid droning, “Okay, let’s make a start because we have a lot to get through today” and then talking into the ceiling.
This kind of dynamic presence can also communicate key concepts. For instance, when teaching the unnerving nature of surveillance in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design, Thommie started a class slowly rotating in the middle of the room. “I hated it,” one of her students said. “It was like she was always watching us – and then I realised that was the point.”
Attitude
Although Allen advocates having an authentic voice, he says it’s crucial to break this up for comic effect with a palette of “minority personalities”, for instance snapping from happy to distraught. Allen calls this the performer’s “personality crisis”.
Similarly, while a teacher may present a dominant emotion when presenting a topic, we often play out our own doubts: a critical voice (“Isn’t Hamlet so self-absorbed?”), a defensive voice (“Hamlet is a product of his context – what choice did he have?”), or a cynical voice (“He uses madness as an excuse to avoid action”). Such attitudinal snaps are built into academic education, as any literature review explicitly requires identifying a range of conflictual expert voices on a topic.
Technique
As Allen’s first five strategies are developed, more overtly curated performances can be perfected as set pieces.
Thommie has read aloud chunks of Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge in a Brooklyn drawl for teaching English literature. Her colleague in geography uses metaphor-driven storytelling: turning the water cycle into a tragic romance between “Evie Evaporation” and “Percy Precipitation”.
On his Conflict and the Media module, Matthew introduces Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model by offering students a substandard cup of coffee – figuratively “filtered” through the biases of corporate ownership, advertising and elite ideology, and delivered in the fiendish persona of a media baron, Rupert Harmsworth Dacre Beaverbrook Murdoch.
Matthew introduces another key concept – constructionism – by reading aloud The Plot Against The King, a children’s book written by current FBI director Kash Patel, which exculpates the Trump presidency through a painfully thin metaphor featuring the villainous “Hillary Queenton” (genuinely). The reading serves as a comic artefact to highlight how political legitimacy is ideologically constructed across even the most seemingly unlikely aspects of mediated culture and, by positioning the students as gullible toddlers, raises questions about power and propaganda.
Alison Edgley, a senior lecturer in health at the University of Nottingham, told us, “I hadn’t thought that what I do is theatrics. But as I became more experienced, I did think about pause and silence much more deliberately. I let key terms breathe. I lean in when I want the students to feel the significance of a point.”
The takeaway? This isn’t about teachers doing TED talks or, God forbid, trying to be funny. Stagecraft is a six-pronged toolkit. If you’re at the front of the room, the spotlight’s already on you – so learn to use it. Not to perform at students, but to connect with them.
Matthew Alford is lecturer in politics at the University of Bath and Thommie Gillow is lead practitioner in KS5 English and oracy at the Cabot Learning Federation.
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