Analysis of a School Thief by Dennis Potter

Analysis of School
Thief by Dennis Potter

This
essay focuses on the playSchool Thiefby
Dennis Potter, a short fiction between a teacher and her students. Potter
passionately wrote most of his plays for television, with several of them being
considered the best playwriting pieces. TheSchool
Thiefwas adapted from theStand-Up,
Nigel Barton, a play from 1965. The play is set in a classroom with characters
being the teacher and her students. The play’s main character is Miss Tillings,
the student’s class teacher. The students in the play are between the ages of 8
and 13 years and include Nigel, Bert, Pringle, and others. Miss Tillings
discusses the missing daffodil with her class. The students depict incidents
during the play to help the audience grasp the narrative. The play’s thought
defines the plot’s significance. This establishes the play’s topic, which
involves a misplaced object in the classroom. The opening passage of the play
hints at a misplaced object, which must have been taken. This is demonstrated
repeatedly throughout the play, and Miss Tillings is preoccupied with locating
the missing flower.

Diction
refers to the choice of words and the lexicon of phrases used in writing.
Aristotle describes diction as the correct organization of words within a play,
either formally or informally. In the playThe
School Thief, both formal and informal dictions were employed. Miss
Tilling, for example, has utilized formal diction as part of her job as a
teacher. She has employed a variety of vocabulary to convey the formality of
the language. For instance, “Quiet Pringle! All right, Nigel. Thank
you.” “Come out to the front, George Pringle!” “You better
had, Barton! And be quick about it!” Second, the play used informal
diction, in which the students do not enunciate their words officially. An
illustration, in this case, is “Um. I don’t like to say, Miss.”