John Reed Middleton 
Fear 
A Collection of Scenes about Fear

FEAR is a play for students in Years 9, 10 or 11 (Level 5/1). It is designed for a normal-sized English class and for students with varying interests in acting. Every scene deals with a situation in which FEAR takes center stage. The themes are geared to the experiences of students today and offer young actresses and actors the opportunity to discover FEAR in its many guises while performing. The plots range from believable to supernatural, often straddling the gap between real objects of fear and the darker side of the human psyche. The language is idiomatic and accessible for advanced English learners. FEAR works well when performed for smaller audiences: parents and other classes. But it can also be highly entertaining for a large audience. Performing time: about 90 minutes. Of course, it is also possible to select individual scenes and perform them as simple skits outside the context of FEAR. In that case it is still recommendable to create a suitable setting for presenting the skits to an audience. The true joy of performing a foreign-language play is to feel it click, to realize that the people watching the performance don’t only ‘get the picture’, they are also delighted to see a story come to life when presented in English by non-native performers.

About the author

John Middleton was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (USA).
He was a teacher for 43 years at a German school in Hamburg where he taught English, Drama and Art.
He has also spent over 35 years subtitling films and translating screenplays (www.middleton-group-translations.com).
During the past 30 years he has performed his own five one-act plays (‘David, the Death of a Clown’, ‘Carnival at Castle Rock’, ‘Killing Daddy’, ‘Little Goethe’ and ‘Das Kleid’) at small theaters in and around Hamburg.

THE PLAYLET SERIES is his latest writing project, topical collections of scenes in English for English learners from Year 1 to Year 12 (Level 1 to Level 6) who want to perform (english-playlets.com).