The Alleynian 703 2015

Pictured : Theo Forbes (Year 13), centre, with the ensemble in Howard’s Woyzceck (top), Marcus Kottering (Year 12), Ollie Norton-Smith (Year 13) and Jonathan Bray (Year 13) (middle, from left to right) and Jakob Hedberg (Year 13) and Hamish Lloyd Barnes (Year 12) in Spenser’s A Trip to Scarborough (bottom).

Upper School House Drama

Lesley Sharp, adjudicator

T he evening was full of enthusiasm and energy. When I go into the theatre, commitment is the most important thing I look for, and this evening nobody was ‘sold a pup’. The night opened with Drake’s Journey’s End , in which the audience saw uniformly excellent acting accompanied by a real understanding of period language. Thomas Baldachin and Alex Holley, as Stanhope and Raleigh, were successful in creating tension within the piece, and the play was particularly moving because of the age of the students and the evident empathy with those at the front in the Great War. Immediately after the audience were thrust into a disturbing kaleidoscopic world that we didn’t really want to go further into, but were attracted to because of its weirdness. Roald Dahl would have been pleased by this production from his Tales of the Unexpected , with Jack Evans particularly engaging. The play also featured the most disturbing image of the night – the Waitress played by George Abbott, a refugee from Spenser House! Grenville’s self-penned The Madness of Dr Faustus was strikingly effective in the use of the stage to create the darkness of the world that Faustus inhabited. Hamish Kerr and Nick Flay faced a daunting technical challenge when they were speaking together, but this was the moment when the play really took off, creating a very real sense of danger. Howard followed with Woyzeck, a piece that exhibited thrilling ensemble work. Meticulously rehearsed action left the audience wanting to see the cast perform the whole play. The clarity of Ollie Norton-Smith’s direction was a lesson in what you can achieve with just an empty stage and there was not one member of the ensemble that could be singled out – that is, perhaps, the mark of the level at which the students were working. Following the interval, Sidney, presented The Goons – it’s always good to see a man in tights on the stage, but Ed Reid’s unabashed use of Lycra here was truly amazing. The play created a strange world: who was the dead hero and what were The Goons doing there? Patrick Hughes’ extraordinary Monsieur Poullet was a

highly comic addition to this odd collection of very un- super Super Heroes. Next, Raleigh’s Game of Chance featured highly original writing by Ed McNamara and I really loved it. There were disturbing images and imaginings about war and soldiers that intrigued me. Luke Bliss was soft and beautiful in his role as Sam Alter. Marlowe’s Cosa Nostra successfully created the world of 1950s New York, with Eddie Graham’s script capturing the language of the era and the Raymond Chandler-like quality of the plot line. The accents were all convincing, particularly the lumbering figure of Don Vincenzo, played by Marko Marsenic. Spenser’s adaptation of Sheridan’s A Trip to Scarborough was undertaken with great boldness and was pictorially beautifully realised, with wonderful physicality and movement from Jakob Hedberg and Hamish Lloyd Barnes. It was an interesting and bold choice of play – period drama is not an easy choice, and the students should be congratulated for being determined to tackle one of the most difficult genres. As far as the evening went, I loved, loved, loved it! I’m still on a high from the creativity and talent that abounds in the theatre: it oozes from every nook and cranny and every person connected to it. Congratulations to all.

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