Plot overview — Leave Taking — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Plot overview
Introduction
What you need to know
The whole play in brief, scene by scene, from Enid's visit to the obeah woman to Del reading her mother's palm, and where its eight scenes are set.
Where each scene is set, in Mai's flat in Deptford or Enid's living room in North London, and how weeks pass between some scenes.
The moments OCR has set: Viv's visit to Del at Mai's in Scene 5 (June 2024, sisters meeting), Del coming home to face Enid, Viv and Brod in Scene 2 (June 2025, tension in the family), and, in its specimen questions, the row in Scene 2 that ends in the slap (characters as outsiders).
The other moments OCR's mark schemes suggest for the second part, from the first visit to Mai to Brod's story in Scene 7.
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.
