Year 9 Drama classes recently undertook the challenge of being given a key word around which they had to create an original piece of drama. The boys took the opportunity on Thursday 14 May to show family, staff and fellow pupils the fruits of their labour. The Tithe Barn Theatre was once again put to good use; the stage was set and the audience was packed to the rafters. A group of students welcomed family and staff into the theatre, offering complimentary refreshments. Drama teacher Ms Jenny Unwin was on hand to thank parents and friends for attending and offering their support and encouragement to the students.
The show, comprised of seven pieces, was opened by a short performance from the Physical Theatre club. The group put on a very competent performance as a young boy, playing a video game, who gets sucked into the virtual world and thrown into a fight. The short performance had no speech, using music as a soundtrack and formulated entirely around the aspects of physical theatre that the boys had learnt during the co-curricular club. The following group to take the spotlight continued with the physical theatre theme, enacting a bar fight.
The next group to perform had created a piece centred around the word ‘lost’. The piece focused on a stag party, from which two of the members had gone missing. The piece was thrilling and fast-paced, with comedy injected in the characters of the bumbling, unfortunate policeman and the gangster-style night club owner.
‘Trust’ was the next word used to create original drama, and the group performed a piece about four intrepid mountaineers, who survived a wild storm only to be tied up by a mountain tribal family. Costume was used to great effect in this piece, to emphasise the immense disparity between the westernised men climbing the mountain, and the native tribesmen who lived there year round.
The following piece had a very hard-hitting theme: using the word ‘hope’ as a starting point, the boys had put together an emotional piece about Jewish families held in concentration camps at the hands of the Nazi Germans. The ending saw one child, on the cusp of escape, being shot by one of the guards. As the remaining prisoners were led offstage, the lights dimmed with only the sound of machine gun fire in the distance; the desperate plight of the captives was made painfully clear.
The next piece adopted a more light-hearted theme. Beginning with a group deciding to go on an adventure in honour of their recently deceased friend, they quickly discover a magic stick, belonging to a tribal doctor. Realising its power, the friends take it back to the city to sell, and so begins a cat and mouse chase with the tribal family racing to retrieve it. A comic play, there was a particularly amusing boy-meets-girl moment, when the two locked eyes and Lionel Ritchie’s Hello started playing. The final piece, although based around a sombre theme, had an uplifting ending: an evil dictatorship had ripped apart a family of four, and, despite years of separation and isolation, the eventual overturning of the government brought the family back together.
Students not in the spotlight were likely behind it: integral to the success of the evening were the boys responsible for sound and lighting, as well as backstage management and front of house duties. Ms Jenny Unwin said of the evening that she was ‘incredibly proud of the hard work and commitment shown by all pupils, and really touched by the number of people who came to support the evening.’
