Gotcha Context

Like all plays, Barrie Keeffee's 'Gotcha' (part of the the Gimme Shelter set), is influenced hugely by what surrounded Barrie Keeffee at the time of writing and the years before. This is what's called the context. The context of a play is made up of three main categories, social/ political, cultural and historical. All the parts of context can be considered as contributing factors to the play.When looking closer at the context, we can see that all of these categorizes to infact overlap. 

When writing the play, Keeffee used a lot of his personal history in terms of likening him self to the character of the kid in the sense that he went to a big, tough school and felt he was lost in the education system with that feeling of being anonymous. At the time the play was set and written, Keeffee felt that the more intelligent, the 'uni goers' were the only known ones within school and this level of context evidently has an impact on the play.  This is shown throughout eh uncertainty of the kid on what he's going to do after being made to leave school at the age of 16. 'Dunno...' he answers to 'What are you going to do? ... What job?'

This point (above) also relates to the cultural context, as well as the historical one, as Barrie Keeffee admits he wanted to give voice to people that would't normally get this in the theatre. This relates directly to the historical context of the play, with the boy not being heard or noticed by anyone in the education system. 

The context of the play is still relevant today as this sense of loss in the education system in this day and age. I feel this is something Barrie Keeffee intended to do when writing the play.