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DRAMA & DANCE
The colour, intensity and imagination that our lighting candidates displayed was engaging and, forgive the pun, genuinely illuminating
Never Too Late used techniques of multi-roling and verbatim sequences particularly effectively to make the audience consider their own pathways in life. We’re familiar with Sliding Doors , but the students’ play looked at the cyclical nature of life through the framing device of a gaudy game show. Looping and repetition were central to the question of how much is fate and how much is free will. William Bradley, Saverio Jones, Derrin Sevin and Henry Yang amused, intrigued and moved us with some heightened cartoon-style characterisations and slapstick physical comedy, as well as some compelling movement set pieces. In Let’s Play , inspired by Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks , the audience was drawn into an enigmatic midnight world beneath the sodium glare of the street lamp. The play cleverly developed a Faustian theme of greed and desire in an engaging game of life. Toby Polli, Elliott Seward and Natey Wilson deftly made manifest the themes of morality and risk within the framing device of a card game, with the gamblers rolling for increasingly high stakes under the Machiavellian glare of Will Carter Off Screen played with light and shade, and was inspired by research into Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro. It was, perhaps, the play with the most immediate thematic impact as it dealt with today’s contemporary preoccupation with selfies, vanity and self-obsession. Rufus Angel, Isaac Dudzicki, Frank Gibbons, Wilf Patten, Callum Skinner and Xavier Wild skilfully brought the Twittersphere to life in a physical collage of slick choreographed moves and hilarious hashtags, before switching the tone to realistic exchanges with the cautionary advice to beware ‘the relentless lure of the blue light’. Toward the end of the piece the audience were confronted with unsettling facts about teenage life today – it was a bold choice to put in front of an audience of parents. It spoke from the heart and enabled our own young teenagers to present their own anxieties with passion, imagination and consideration. In a world where ‘safe spaces’ are difficult to find, the Edward Alleyn stage allowed boys joyfully and imaginatively to engage with the most complex of problems. It was an evening to be proud of.
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