Every year the drama company associated with Shiplake College, Scruffy Penguin, travels to Scotland to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This involves a week of intensive rehearsals before we leave, and then nine days at the Fringe. The company gets fully involved with all of the aspects of the fringe, which includes selling their show by flyering, cooking their own food and, of course, six days of performing at a professional venue. This was a great experience, even though it was somewhat challenging at times.
Following the previous years’ success, Ms Davies thought it would be fun to do another comedy. She wrote a brilliant script about dogs and their owners, called ‘A Dogs’ Tail’. It was really funny, which made it hard to rehearse as most of the time was spent laughing instead of acting. During the long and tiring rehearsals, our young actors were all tested in their own ways. All of the actors had to learn their characters to the point of becoming them. A special mention has to go to Charlie Bradshaw who spent at least half an hour on just one line, trying to perfect it. The Scruffy Penguin Theatre Co knew it was getting better throughout the week as both Mrs Hine and Ms Davies were laughing more and more during each run through.
After the long drive up to Edinburgh, the boys had the rest of the day to relax before the tech rehearsal the following morning. The time between performances was spent flyering to advertise the show and watching some other inspirational shows. A Dogs' Tail's first performance was shaky, but a surprisingly large audience boosted the confidence of the performers. The group had two sell out shows and a wonderful week of performing. Of course, they wouldn’t have had an audience if it hadn’t been for the flyering, although this didn’t come naturally to some of the company. By the end, even the shy members of the cast had got the hang of talking to strangers and getting everyone excited about ‘A Dogs’ Tail’.
The weeks’ experiences really improved everyone's social and acting skills, which will really benefit the students in the future. None of this would have been possible without the hard work of Ms Davies, Mrs Hine, Miss Hine, and Jack, so on behalf of the company - Thank you!
Scruffy Penguin also held a one-night-only performance of A Dog's Tail on the evening of Monday 25 September. With only two empty seats, the performance was a hit with pupils and staff at Shiplake College. Actor Fenn Hewitt said, 'The performance went really well. There were only a couple of seats left before we performed so it was good to have an audience - not as big as in Edinburgh though!'.
