John Tate and Richard — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
John Tate and Richard
Characters
What you need to know
How Kelly presents John Tate and Richard, and how the character develops across the text: the two who try to lead: John Tate, whose threats and bans cannot hold the group and who is later said to have found God, and Richard, who stands up to him, follows Phil instead and ends the play in Leah's place.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I'm under a lot of stress', 'I really am getting a little bit cross', 'do not use that word', 'Don't say it', 'everything's fine', 'He won't come out of his room', 'He's joined the Jesus army', 'You shouldn't threaten me John', 'Not me again', 'When are you going to come down', 'How do you think they're living', 'Come back to us'.
John Tate's leadership by threat in the one scene he appears in: insecure, stressed and banning talk of death, until he asks the group what to do and Phil answers; afterwards we hear he has 'lost it' and 'found God'.
Richard: the likely leader who stands up to John Tate but follows Phil, twice leads Brian off on Phil's orders, and in the last scene takes Leah's place, reporting everyone's fate to a Phil who will not answer.
OCR's questions name John Tate's denials as a way of avoiding the truth (2023) and Richard's final speech of unanswered questions as a moment of disagreement (2025).
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
