Drama
Fabulous term for theatre and performance
It is a busy term for Drama at Rydal Penrhos, as theatre and performance continued to thrive.
Among a packed calendar of events some standout highlights were the school's LAMDA Drama Evening, a captivating Combat Workshop, and all-important GCSE Drama exams. Additionally, a number of thrilling theatre trips took place and a new Junior production was announced.
To keep you abreast of all these exciting developments, we have put together a short recap of highlights from Drama at Rydal Penrhos since half-term. As we now reflect on a successful term, we can also look forward to a similarly engaging summer of acting, theatre and performance.
A highlight of the new term will be the upcoming Junior (Year 7 to 9) production at the end of June. We are delighted to announce that Key Stage 3 will perform ‘Henry the Tudor Dude’, a fun, energetic and informative play by Kjartan Poskitt.
Depicting the life of Henry VIII, England's most outrageous monarch, this rock-and-roll musical will delight our budding actors and audiences alike.
With rehearsals set to start after Easter, we look forward to sharing more about our latest production very soon!
LAMDA Celebration Evening
Rydal Penrhos celebrated the amazing progress its LAMDA participants are making during a recent evening of performances on Thursday 2 March.
LAMDA Speech and Drama lessons are an optional extra to our curriculum, led by peripatetic teacher Mrs Christina Bloomfield. Lessons have proven consistently popular with pupils and parents, thanks to their quite unique ability to improve confidence, performance and communication skills.
Deputy Head Boy and Year 13 pupil Tristan Martin, who played a starring role in November's Senior production of 'Under Milk Wood', acted as host and narrator for the LAMDA Drama Evening. The talent on display was impressive, and guests thoroughly enjoyed the evening.
It was also a very useful practice opportunity for those pupils who were training towards the Chester Festival, where Rydal Penrhos achieved an amazing array of results, including fourteen first prizes. This is a truly impressive feat and speaks to the depth of talent developing their skills and self-assuredness on stage. A full report on the Chester Festival will follow soon.
Combat Workshop
Also taking place on Thursday 2 March was the much-anticipated Combat Workshop, which provided a valuable opportunity for pupils to learn how to convincingly imitate violence and combat on stage.
This is an essential skill for physical theatre and a good example of movement work without a text. For Year 12, the activity also served as a teambuilding exercise to boost togetherness and team spirit.
Pupils had plenty of fun learning these new skills, and it was certainly a far cry from the typical classroom lesson!
GCSE Drama Examination Performances
Our GCSE Drama pupils recently undertook a key part of their course as they completed their examination performances, which were the culmination of weeks of practice and fine tuning of their approaches to their selected texts.
Pupils performed extracts from 'The Fall' and 'Our Country's Good.' James Fritz's play 'The Fall' takes a funny, moving, and candid look at young people's relationships with older people, confronting the frightening prospect of ageing in a country undergoing crises of housing and care.
'Our Country's Good' is a 1988 play written by British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker. The story concerns a group of Royal Marines and convicts in a penal colony in New South Wales, in the 1780s, who put on a production of The Recruiting Officer.
Pupils were highly-impressive and mature in their performances. We are confident they will secure top honours not only in acting but also in stage design.
Parents may notice the foot of a dead body sticking out in one of the photos, but fear not, this is part of the staging!
Theatre Trips
As part of our ongoing efforts to give pupils access to quality theatre, which benefits their happiness and wellbeing, as well as their understanding of the subject of Drama, pupils travelled to see a modern adaptation of Shakespeare in the form of ‘Comedy of Errors (More or Less)’ at Shakespeare North Playhouse.
The exciting production used much of the original script intercut with 20th century vernacular. The two pairs of divided twins, central to the plot, were caught between cultures of Scarborough and Prescot. The audience were encouraged to sing-along with classic eighties hits including 'Mickey', 'Material Girl' and 'Wanna Dance with Somebody'. Year 12 pupil Fayeth Jones was even invited on stage at the end, as the company sought volunteers to help perform the complicated dénouement.
Pupils have also enjoyed outings to see 'The Life of Pi' as part of National Theatre Live at Theatr Colwyn and 'An Inspector Calls' at Liverpool Everyman. The latter was a particularly useful excursion, given the fact the classic J. B. Priestley play is a Year 10 GCSE English Literature text and a Year 11 Drama text. Noah Lewis, a Year 11 pupil certainly felt a sense of nostalgia watching the unorthodox murder-mystery; ten years prior, he was part of the cast when the play was staged at Llandudno's Venue Cymru (see below).
There are many more exciting theatre trips to look forward to over the rest of this year; a highlight of the upcoming Trinity Term will be an outing to see ‘The Great Gatsby’ at Theatr Clwyd on 22 June 2023.
