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THE ALLEYNIAN 709
DRAMA & DANCE
UPPER SCHOOL HOUSE DRAMA
In a year when theatre was hard to come by, we were delighted to be able to stage the Upper School House Drama competition on 10 December with performers and audience drawn from the Year 13 bubble. Sadly, the event excluded all Year 12 performers – but they will have their day! The evening was extraordinary in terms of the enthusiasm of the boys and the large number of participants, many of whom had never been seen on the EAT stage before. Deprived of social interaction, our experts and novices were hungry for the experience of appearing before an audience. The material spanned the centuries from Goldoni to Godber, with a smattering of Elizabethan and Victorian, as well as original contemporary adaptations. Marlowe’s A Christmas Carol was a play that truly was full of Christmas spirit, ironically so, given that all our Christmases were cancelled a week later. Michael McGrorty played Jacob Marley with an appropriately frightening and well-chained demeanour, meanwhile Luke Stevens-Cox played Scrooge with an admirable focus. Drake’s adaptation of Stepbrothers was a work of love, created by Dylan Schofield. Adaptations of cult films have provided ripe fodder for House Drama over the years and this proved no exception. The staging captured the treehouse setting and the use of the trapdoor was inspired. It was an inventive, witty and amusing excerpt that delighted the audience. Howard presented Amadeus . Max Hamilton played the composer Salieri, producing an accomplished and assured monologue. Bathed in red light and using Mozart’s music as the background
for his speech, he gripped the audience, conveying Salieri’s pained anguish at the beauty of Mozart’s music. Max was awarded the adjudicator’s prize for courageously taking on this solo feat to such captivating effect. Spenser’s Bouncers was a feat of technical and theatrical magic. Lolly Whitney Low was forced to self-isolate just as their tech rehearsal was completed, so plaudits go to Max Rowley-Sanchez for joining the trio of Josh Billington, Innes Harvey and Luca Kemp at short notice, while with some technical magic Lolly joined the cast via Zoom to jointly play the role of Les. The ensemble really did overcome this hurdle to produce a witty, engaging and well-choreographed piece of theatre. The magic of the internet! It was wholly fitting that Spenser took the top slot in a year which has seen us in the hybrid of the virtual and real world, and also that Lolly was awarded the Max Hunter cup for his outstanding contribution to Drama at Dulwich. Alfie Cook from Grenville directed Goldini’s Servant of Two Masters , familiar to many from its recent incarnation as One Man, Two Guvnors . Lawrie Beckett played Florindo and Beatrice
December’s Upper School House Drama event was an opportunity for Year 13 to come together in an evening of theatrical magic, says Peter Jolly
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