Drama and Arts
Drama plays an important role in the extra-curricular activities established at The King's School.
There are many opportunities for pupils from all year groups to get involved in theatre productions, musicals, Trinity Guildhall drama examinations and theatre visits. They are encouraged to take part in production and technical aspects of theatre work as well as taking acting roles.
Recent Theatre visits include "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Measure For Measure" and "The Importance of Being Earnest" (at Clwyd Theatr Cymru).
Productions in the school year 2009-2010
This year's major production is Les Misérables. There are evening performances, starting at 7:30pm, on 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th March 2010, and an afternoon performance, starting at 2:00pm, on 6th March. There are more details and a link to ticket booking information on the Les Misérables page.
Productions in the school year 2008-2009
The Vikings and Darwin by David Mamet - a sixth form production directed by Emma Lucia
Director's notes (written by Emma Lucia)
One place to start might be the title Mamet gives his short play.
The Vikings are traditionally seen as axe-weilding barbarians raping and pillaging their way across Europe, heedless of their own lives and those of others, Thor’s hammer and Odin’s raven symbolizing the violence of their pagan gods. Lately archeologists have discovered an additional portrait of the Vikings as artists, traders, poets, and artisans with a progressive political system; bringing some improvements to the countries they inhabited.
Darwin’s ideas were revolutionary and his legacy served to transform the way we understand the world today. His theories and discoveries were described as ‘intellectual dynamite’ exploding the world order of the 19th century forever.
It is fascinating that Mamet should write this play touching briefly on the intellectual inheritance of this great scientist exactly two hundred years after his birth.
The Vikings and Darwin is an intellectual debate about the nature of free will and predestination. The play’s characters discuss the fate of two imaginary soldiers who both experience a premonition of impending death. Does either go out to face that death with the spirit of a Viking? There is talk of berserkers:
"His men went without armour and were crazed as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, were strong as bears or bulls. They killed men, but neither fire nor iron affected them. That is called going berserk."
Ynglinga Saga Snorri
And how much of the fate of these imaginary soldiers is determined by their genetic inheritance? How much of their behaviour is determined by instinct rather than conscious choice?
What does it mean to whistle for a wind? It was a sailors' superstition that a wind could be raised by whistling for it, ‘to put a ship back on its course’ and yet, in more modern times the phrase has meant, ‘to entertain false hopes’.
Only a little hour ago
I was whistling to St Antonio
For a capful of wind to fill our sail
And instead of a breeze he sent a gale
Longfellow Golden Legend V
So the cast has plenty of intellectual debate to grapple with, but this is only the starting point for a production. Where is the play set? Who are the characters we meet? Mamet mischievously decides not to tell us. We know nothing about where the play is set and the characters have no names or descriptions. All we have to work with is a fascinating text and very precise punctuation. This is the challenge set.
We eventually choose to find a very precise setting for the play in order to explore Mamet’s themes and intentions. We are in The Map Room of the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, London and it is 24 May 1941. The Five members of the Map Room staff receive the devastating news that 1,415 British sailors have lost their lives; there are only three survivors, as the Germans in the Battle of the Denmark Strait have sunk HMS Hood. The play begins…
My mother once told me
She’d buy me a longship
A handsome oared vessel
To go sailing with Vikings
To stand at the stern-post
And steer a fine warship
Then head back for harbour
And hew down some foemen.
Egils Saga Ch.40
Our Country's Good by Ms Timberlake Wertenbaker - a King's Players production directed by David Whitley
On June 4th, 1789, the first play ever to be staged in Australia was performed in Sydney. The play was George Farquhar’s military comedy, The Recruiting Officer – a play of sparkling social satire and mistaken identity. The audience was small, the set was improvised, and the performance was for one night only. Under most circumstances, it would probably have gone unrecorded. Except for one thing – at this time, Sydney was still a convict colony, and every one of the actors in this play had been transported to the other side of the earth for their crimes.
Our Country’s Good is the story of that production. Told through the eyes of the play’s director, the young and ambitious Lieutenant Ralph Clark, it explores how one extraordinary, strange idea – to put on a play with convicts as actors – began the process of changing Sydney from a failing, violent, mutinous outpost, to the first city of a new nation. How a ragged assortment of thieves, thugs and whores found an entirely new way of seeing the world, and discovered their own voices in another man’s words.
Based on the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally, (most famous for writing the book that became the film Schindler’s List), Our Country’s Good spreads itself over the months leading up to the performance, looking at the effects of this extraordinary event from every angle. Needless to say, when the mostly illiterate convicts first attempt to tackle the drawing room wit of Farquhar, the play fizzes with comedy. But there are also many darker moments, and the King’s Players have relished the explorations of the convicts’ pain and alienation, and the effect that the draconian laws of the colony had on prisoner and officer alike.
Throughout the play, the different worlds twist together in powerful, and often unsettling ways – be it in the doomed affair between tormented Midshipman Harry Brewer and his convict lover, Duckling Smith, or the undisguised vitriol of Major Ross, who takes out his frustrations over losing the American colonies on his prisoners. And, forever in the background, the haunting figure of a lone Aborigine comments on the unfolding action, unaware of the impact that these seeming “ghosts” will have on his land.
In this award-winning play, Wertenbaker creates a piece that is by turns rough, sombre and warm, an examination of human love, and cruelty, and the transcendent power of the theatre. And the young cast rise to the challenge with sensitivity and bravura, to make an unforgettable evening.
Our Country’s Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, was performed on 12th, 13th and 14th March 2009.
Other recent productions
A Child's Christmas - produced by members of the lower school, directed by Emma Lucia
A Child's Christmas In Wales was published in 1955. It is an anecdotal sketch of the festive season which emerged from a piece originally written for radio. It is an exercise in storytelling and Thomas recreates the experience of Christmas as though it were a fairy tale.
He describes an old fashioned picture book Christmas which is meant to be familiar to everyone. At one point, while the narrator is remembering festivities from the past the voice of a small child asks him "Were there Uncles like in our house?" He replies, "There are always Uncles at Christmas", emphasising that the experience of Christmas is a universal experience shared by everyone.
But Thomas is keen to emphasise that modern Christmases are not as good as the ones he remembers. In the past, "It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas". This remembered snow was not the same as that which we have now: it was a "dumb, numb thunderstorm of white," and far more exciting. Thomas recreates the nostalgic magic of a childhood Christmas when everything was brighter and better.
A Child's Christmas In Wales is about recreating the atmosphere of Christmas, and at the end of the story Thomas generates a real sense of magic. His closing line 'I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept' introduces a childlike spirituality and the suggestion of a wider mystery. The long smooth words of this sentence contrast greatly with the fast lists and choppy clauses of the rest of the story and they are a reminder that Thomas was by nature a poet.
Like Thomas' poetry, the story does not follow a narrative structure: it contains a series of descriptive passages all designed to contribute to an overall effect. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone in 1978 for a definitive edition, this is one of Thomas' most popular pieces of writing, demonstrating his poetic ability to create vivid impressions of events and to invoke emotions.
Words: Alice Eardley
BBC Website
Children of Oedipus - performed by Shell (Year 8) pupils, directed by Emma Lucia
Antigone is an ancient story written by Sophocles and first performed in Athens in the 5th century B.C.
The Children of Oedipus is based on a version of Antigone written by Jean Anouilh. It was first performed in Paris in 1942 when France was occupied by German troops. This was a time of strict theatre censorship and it is interesting that the occupying forces allowed the play to be performed. It suggests an assumption that an audience’s sympathies would lie with the beleaguered government figures who do their best to retain law and order in a volatile state.* However, there must also have been many audience members who connected with the Children of Oedipus** whose small voices courageously say a defiant ‘no’ to the way the government is operating.
Our version is an ensemble piece where the voices of the government and the opposing children are allowed to ring out and debate the balance between the necessity for state security versus the rights of freedom of choice for the individual. A topical subject during the current ‘War on Terror.’ It is a political drama examining the fundamental role of government as well as the personal politics of the children. Ultimately it is a tragedy, as the Children of Oedipus decide to reject life. Their final action becomes an aesthetic rather than an ethical choice. Having recognized the evil and corruption in the world, they ultimately reject life for its ugliness and its inability to live up to their youthful expectations. They refuse a world of compromise.
What kind of happiness do you foresee for me? Paint me the picture of your vision of my happiness. What are the important little sins that I shall have to commit before I am allowed to sink my teeth into life and tear happiness from it?
I spit on your idea of life – that life must go on come what may…I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it!
And finally, to introduce you to the setting for our drama. We are in the city of Thebes. The Delphic Oracle has been fulfilled and Oedipus has killed his father, married his mother and has now died in exile. His two sons, Polynices and Eteocles, have brought about a civil war, having fought and been killed over their conflicting claims to the throne. The newly formed government is attempting to re-establish order. It has decided to proclaim Eteocles a national hero and give him a state funeral. In stark contrast it has ordered that Polynices’ body is to be left to rot outside the city walls as a dire warning to Theban citizens to keep the peace. An edict has been issued stating that anyone who attempts to give Polynices a religious burial will be put to death. So the story begins…
Notes:
*represented in the original text by one man, Creon
**represented in the original text by one of the daughters of Oedipus, Antigone
Photo albums of other recent productions and arts events
Animal Farm - produced by members of the Sixth Form, directed by Josh Hatfield
Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare's play in a modern setting
Into the Woods - a production of the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, directed by David Whitley