Students staged extracts from Nick Dear’s adaptation of Frankenstein and Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde . Both are timeless tales of terror, exploring humanity’s capacity for both good and evil with dra- matical potential to intrigue, unsettle and disarm. Two groups tackled extracts from Frankenstein , which in Nick Dear’s version is a hauntingly humane, shrewd- ly intelligent retelling of timeless terror, reimagined through the lens of a fixated scientist’s sad, hapless creation. One group, in the guises of the Creature, embodied the rhythms of early inquisitive science, birth, innocence, learning, lust and murder in an early 19th-century industrial landscape. The Creatures’ ensemble of Sebastian Hitchcock-Spencer, Orson Matthews, Seven McQueen, James Pinon-Williams and Julius Pyner delivered a brilliantly unsettling depic- tion of consciousness originating from the imagination of scientific genius. Their performance conveyed the The Year 11 Drama GCSE students demonstrated maturity beyond their years with their highly impactful and charged performance work, says Lucy Mackenzie
profound themes of isolation and alienation, creating a haunting theatrical experience for the audience. The cohort of Ned Bishop, George Dimbleby, Luca Dormer, Zachy Fleming and Tristan Sevanot Davis daringly depicted the brutal and fragile ego of a broken scientist who has witnessed the birth of a monstrous miracle. The Scientists’ ensemble instilled fear as they held a mirror up to humanity and its desire for progress, success and survival at the cost of beauty, truth and innocence. They delved into the deep emo- tional and psychological aspects of the story, creating a timely, scarring and unsettling vision of the wheels turning and the final hope of the human form marching, puppet-like, towards its own oblivion. In Neil Bartlett’s Jekyll and Hyde adaptation, myster- ious occurrences in Victorian London unravel the facade of respectability, revealing the dark underbelly of society. This adaptation sees a series of strange occurrences and arbitrary nocturnal assaults in the back streets and alleyways of Victorian London spreading fear and panic. Meanwhile, the friends of a highly respected doctor are beginning to wonder why he goes missing on exactly the same nights. This inventive, theatrical adaptation cuts right to the heart of Robert Louis
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THE ALLEYNIAN 712
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