Role-Playing Les Miserables

How do we bring alive an 18th-century classic text like Les Miserables? Certainly, a great film adaptation with stars like Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, and Russell Crowe helps. The question, though, is how to use a film and book together in the classroom and how to integrate role-playing as an additional tool. Teachers may consider showing the movie first to get the students into the story or show it afterwards as a reward. My approach is to purposefully integrate film, role-play, and then text.

The film provides all the necessary context and brings all students into the story. Who are the characters? What are their conflicts? Why are their decisions difficult? The key strategy is to have your finger on the pause button to stop the movie once a major conflict emerges. Don't let the movie finish that part of the story. Now we move into role-play.

Let's take a moment like when the officers bring Jean Valjean back to the priest after he has stolen the candlesticks. Or, when Javert has Jean Valjean stuck in the tunnel (with Marius on his back) and Javert finally has the chance to capture his nemesis after all those years. In both those cases, the movie has given students the context to comprehend the conflict. We role-play using all of the strategies outlined in The Classes They Remember. With the right student actors, we can even throw in song. In a spur of the moment decision, I asked my student playing Javert to sing an interior monologue explaining Javert's conflict over what to do with Jean Valjean. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? Before they interacted the student broke into song and expertly captured the moment. And the whole class was hooked!

Let's not forget the text (which can be either Victor Hugo's novel or some of the songs/poetry from the play and the movie). The film and role-play have brought the students deep into the world of Les Miserables, into the characters, and into the conflicts. Now they are prepared to read those same sections from the excerpted book (Ballentine, 1997) and to analyze the choices, language, and the outcome. They live the story through the film and role-play, but they find out the resolution and do even deeper analysis through the text.