This study reports the ascertaining (constatative) stage of a broader pedagogical experiment examining how the theatrical staging of Mahmudkhoja Behbudi's drama Padarkush (“The Patricide”, 1911) – widely regarded as the first original drama in Uzbek national literature – can be used to strengthen patriotic feeling among secondary school students. Before implementing the staging-based formative intervention, a large-scale diagnostic survey was conducted to establish the baseline level of patriotic understanding achieved through conventional, text-based study of the drama. A 15-item structured questionnaire, scored on a 0–3 point scale for each item, was administered to 259 tenth-grade students from five general secondary schools (No. 1, 2, and 12 in Urganch city and No. 38 and 39 in Urganch district, Khorazm region). The instrument assessed students' comprehension of the drama's characters and central conflict, their grasp of Behbudi's patriotic ideas, and the depth of personal, affective identification with the play's message. Descriptive analysis showed an overall mean score of 1.84 out of 3 (61.3% of the maximum), with 21.7% of responses reaching the highest level, 44.0% a satisfactory level, 30.9% a low level, and 3.4% a very low level of understanding. Item-level analysis revealed that students performed comparatively well on questions requiring plot comprehension and moral evaluation of characters, but noticeably weaker on items requiring deep personal identification with national heritage, biographical knowledge of Behbudi, and the internalization of patriotic self-identity. These findings indicate that conventional textual instruction develops factual and moral comprehension of Padarkush more successfully than its affective, identity-forming dimension, providing an empirical rationale for the formative stage of the experiment, in which theatrical staging – as an embodied, experiential method – is implemented specifically to strengthen this underdeveloped affective component of patriotic education.