D rama shorts
Student directors, producers and performers
Below: Nine
Top right: Oleanna
Centre right: Touched
Bottom right: Zoo Story
Taking part in a school play is often a rite of passage
for students in UK schools. To join a cast is the
first level of engagement. This year many of our
students from Year 10 through to Year 12 have taken
their engagement further by selecting, producing,
organising and performing their own choice of scripts.
The year started with Nine, a two-hander staged
by Alexia Marza and Gabriella FitzGerald (Upper
Sixth), who gave searing performances as victims of
modern-day slavery, and also raised money for the
charity Unseen UK. Robin Brenninkmeijer and Ben
Colley, also Upper Sixth, chose a similarly hard-hitting
subject – the effect of sexism and domestic abuse on
the mental health of young people – for Words That
Cut Like Knives, which they not only performed and
staged but also wrote themselves.
48
PERFORMING ARTS
One of the enriching aspects of preparing a piece for
performance is the level of challenge it brings. ‘Being
the first self-directed piece I’d ever done, I went into
the play with an unparalleled excitement but also
with a sense of uncertainty,’ says Riccardo Roma,
Lower Sixth, who worked alongside three other
students to produce A Night of American Drama,
with Riccardo himself working on a classic piece of
naturalism. ‘I knew the play was too long to perform
whole in the time allocated to us so the first step
was to cut it down. The hyper-naturalistic style
meant that even removing one line had a knock-
on effect throughout the whole piece.’ Riccardo
described the experience as ‘a huge success and the
exciting, tense and fulfilling emotional journey of the
whole production was one I would go through again’.