How Kelly presents Phil, and how the character develops across the text: the silent boy who eats while Leah talks, takes charge with a calm plan to frame a stranger, threatens Brian, decides Adam cannot come back, and ends alone in the field, no longer eating and refusing to rejoin the group.
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 in charge', 'Everyone is happier', 'one person or everyone', 'making it up', 'lays a hand on his shoulder', 'We'll throw you in', 'Our lives are ruined', 'smiles, warm, reassuring', 'Phil shrugs', 'staring at nothing', 'Come back to us'.
Phil's silence as power: eating ice cream, crisps and a waffle while Leah talks, and Kelly's view that Phil keeps quiet because it 'makes the most sense' until he 'stops eating, starts talking and gets involved'.
Different readings: a 'psychopathic ringleader', a cool pragmatist who keeps the group out of prison, or a lonely boy left with nothing once Leah has gone; and how his silences, from the first scene to the last, shape the play.
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.
