Shakespearean Festivities Founder’s Day Folio Fest with Shakespearean Soliloquies June 2024 Our Year 12 A Level students with guests from JAGS punctuated the fabulous Founder’s Day con- cert with beautifully crafted solo performances. Congratulations to Rufus Angel, William Bradley, Frank Gibbons, Nia Keogh Peters, Wilf Patten, and Matthieu Perrin for reminding us of the potency and vibrancy of Shakespeare’s language as a coda to the Folio 400 celebrations.
imaginations flying. The endless possibilities of Gothic tropes, including hauntings, psychological scaring, melodrama, suspense, nightmares and monsters, were seized upon to intrigue, unsettle and provoke. All pieces used elements of chore- ography, realism, verbatim and physical theatre to tell their stories; there was no doubting the enthusiasm and sincerity of their application.
Fearless performances fused naturalism, physical theatre, and powerful storytelling
Four pieces were staged: Camera Shy inspired by Odilon Redon’s painting Haunting depicting a woman surrounded by darkness
Vivid Reinvention Oedipus – Robert Icke
from which ghoulish and horrifying faces emerge, and the image of Castle Espie shrouded in fog with a mysterious silhouette. Tapping into supernatural forces, where things took a paranormal turn for the worse, the piece featured Tom Adair, Harry Blake, Adria Mir Muntades and Andrew Salisbury, with Leo Michaelides’ stylised non-naturalistic lighting design rich in saturated colour, blinders and practical torches. Influenced by Hildur Guðnadóttir’s haunting Joker soundtrack, The Missing Piece unfolded as a poignant exploration of loss and grief within a fractured family. Henry Findlay gave a com- pelling performance as a young boy desperately searching for his lost brother, with Calvin Chen , Noah Darley , and Harri Kokkini as the other family members also struggling with grief. The blood-spattered Luca Mercuri was a startling visual reminder of the lost child. Unfounded Delusions delved into the sinister world of paranoia and delusion. Marly Amarteifio, Joseph Monks and Toby Bamert and Sebastian Sweeney blurred the lines between good and evil, as the protagonist struggled to overcome the darkness that threatened to consume him. Dark Asylum drew inspiration from Van Gogh’s paintings from his asylum period in synthesis with the image and grisly history of the Ten Bells in Spitalfields. The adventurous ensemble of Max Hackleton, Oliver Stallard, Anton Zhelesko, Sullivan Riches and Soloman Adeyemi wove together physical theatre sequences reflecting the troubled inner state, mask work offering the opportunity for darkly comic caricature, and a sequence of direct address.
Inspired by their Live Theatre trip to Robert Icke’s Oedipus , our talented new A Level cohort opted to select extracts from his searing contemporary adaptation of this 2,000-year-old play for their first A Level practical assessment. The dialogues were skilfully staged with the cohort applying techniques associated with naturalism to forensic- ally interrogate the characters of Oedipus, Jocasta and Creon. One described the presentation as “like watching a movie”. Political Corruption, Backstabbing & Dodgy Dealings A Level Dramatic Excellence: The Government Inspector The Upper School examination evidenced per- formance work of the highest dramatic order. Written in 1836, Gogol’s satirical and darkly comic masterpiece was adapted by David Harrower in 2011. His contemporary vison of endemic provincial corruption resonated as sharply as ever. It is not so much a comedy of the absurd, but rather a comedy of the absurd situation. We were presented with a collective exhibition of inexhaustible mediocrity as the local officials mistook an itinerant scoundrel running up debts in the inn to be the elected metropolitan official. They fawned and simpered in his presence, and the roguish anti-hero Khlestakov realising he can get away with murder took full advantage of his new found celebrity status… Mayor Anton Antonovich was played with maniacal bullying glee by William Bradley, and Rufus Angel and
Opposite page, from left to right and top to bottom: [1] The Government Inspector [2] 24 Shakespearean [3] Oedipus [4] GCSE Quest Escape [5] Pax [6] The Mysterious & the Macabre [7] A Matter of Chance [8] Around the World in 80 Days [9] The Mysterious & The Macabre
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