Term 2 began with a bang as we were straight into Show Week. One of the brilliant things about working in partnership with the Everyman Theatre is that our students get to perform in the theatre regularly, in front of a public, paying audience. In the first week of Term 2, both year groups performed their first shows of the year.
The first year students performed Everyone’s Talking About Rebels – a variety show, which included dance, comedy, acting, poetry, spoken word and singing. They chose rebels and rebellion as their theme, and performed pieces from shows such as Les Miserables, Hamilton, Matilda and School of Rock, as well as showing off their acting skills with excerpts from Shakespeare, Dickens and Shelley. There were dance numbers too as the cast explored how dance was used as a way to rebel against social norms. They also cleverly incorporated extracts from speeches made by a number of historical and contemporary rebels from myriad walks of life. The first years are only 7 weeks into their course, but they performed brilliantly to a sold out audience.
The second years performed After Juliet by Sharman MacDonald, a play which deals with the aftermath of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, and the impact the deaths of the two characters had on their teenage friends and family. Some of the characters – Benvolio, Rosaline, Juliet’s Nurse are familiar from Shakespeare’s play, but others are not. Our second years performed superbly, handling intricate characters, poetic text, demanding physical sequences and a complex story brilliantly. Again, they performed to a sold-out audience.
We’re really lucky to be able to perform so regularly in the Everyman. Our students are able to work alongside professional crew, and really get to grips with how the theatre works.
This term, we’ll be working towards two Christmas performances, before moving on to look at our NT Connections play with the first years, and an improvisation project with the second years.
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