DRAMA
Brutal, bewitching and blatant Berkoff A- L E V E L P R E S E N TAT I ON S
Year 13 Drama and Theatre students staged extracts from three iconic plays, inspired by the theatre practitioner Steven Berkoff
Kathryn Norton-Smith
A gainst a backdrop of gang culture, violence and contempt for the mundane, West followed the roguish anti-hero, Mike, as he prepared himself for battle. This piece had the epic quality of a tale of ancient chivalry on the battlefield, laced with the dark humour of rivalry among the delinquents, with outstanding, charged and dynamic performances from all boys. Tyson, Ramsay, Spetale, Stone and Gordon Webb laid bare the savagery implicit in the exchanges and physical confrontation, with due declamatory emphasis of the parody of Shakespearean verse, and deft synchronization in their thrilling choreographed fight sequences Metamorphosis unsettled us with the narrative of Gregor Samsa who awakes one day to find himself turned into a giant dung beetle. The plot revolves around how his family deal with their son’s newfound transformation, and their eventual rejection of Gregor, because of their inability to cope with his metamorphosis. This highly symbolic and expressionistic adaptation of Kafka’s classic narrative was powerfully and evocatively staged, with precision mime and nuanced characterisations from the quartet of Asgard, Blackman, Jeffs and Asamoah, who sensitively articulated not just the heartbreaking violation Gregor feels but the collapse of the world around him.
Finally, we were treated to an extract from Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui , a darkly comic and provocative story about Arturo Ui and his mob of gangsters in 1930s Chicago. Woven into the fabric of the narrative are themes of corruption, power and control, and the play is often see as a political allegory of the rise of Adolph Hitler. The ensemble conjured the darkly satirical world of the hoodlums with a mixture of vaudeville, slick physical theatre and skilled characterisation, to leave us with hairs standing on the backs of our necks as Ui underwent his transformation from petty crook to blood-freezing demagogue. Here, once again, we saw performance work of the highest dramatic order from Kauer, Fleming, Hylton, Spillett and Sampson, and an unforgettable Vaughan Williams in the title role, preaching to the crowd to the strains of the cheering rabble and Wagner’s Tannhäuser . The pieces featured a range of techniques associated with Berkoff, including ensemble playing, multi-rolling, heightened characterisation, detailed mime and choreographed sequences, to convey the complex and unnerving subject- matter in all three plays.
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