Drama Examination Showcase Evenings
On Monday and Tuesday this week (13th-14th January), I was invited by Mrs Cook, Acting Head of Drama, to attend the two AS and A2 Showcase evenings during which the students perform the pieces they have prepared for their forthcoming Practical Exams in front of an audience of parents, family, friends and fellow students. There is a practical purpose behind the Showcase evening which is a course requirement. After each piece, there is an open session with audience members who provide students with feedback about their performance and answer questions from the students themselves. After the Showcase evenings, students are expected to go away, write up what they have learned from these ‘dress rehearsal’ performances and make use of audience feedback to fine-tune their performances during the two or three weeks remaining before the dread day of the Practical Exam itself in front of the visiting examiner. The Practical performance, together with all the students’ pre-performance research and preparation, plus post-Showcase write-ups and assessments, account for a significant percentage of the final AS or A2 mark.
On Monday, we saw the three pieces produced by the A2 groups. For A2, students have to research, write, direct, stage-manage and act in their own prepared ‘docudrama’. ‘Docudramas’ involve a combination of factual film footage, back-projections and slides with information, contemporary sound and music, along with dramatised re-enactments or representations of actual events chosen by the students as subject-matter. All three groups selected challenging and emotionally-charged topics: the case of a Midlands family where the son/brother is murdered and the subsequent harrowing ordeal facing that same family when the convicted murderer escapes from prison and is on the run; an insight into a possible explanation of the notorious Jack the Ripper murders, complete with seedy Victorian backstreet drinking-den and house of ill repute, abortion and murder; and the final piece, a look back at the final afternoon and evening of Marilyn Monroe, in the company of a President, his brother and the glamorous Marilyn herself, the students leaving the audience with the poser “Who do you think killed Marilyn?”.
On Tuesday, there were seven pieces to watch. At AS level, the students in their groups take a segment or segments from a play, then produce their performance in keeping with the precepts of the chosen practitioner – in this instance, Katie Mitchell. We were treated to a broad spectrum of styles and types of play, not to mention a walkabout between the main Arts Centre stage (sometimes seated in the auditorium, sometimes standing on the stage itself) and the Studio. The pieces could not have been more varied, which meant the logistics in setting up for each performance must have been a behind-the-scenes nightmare for all concerned. The seven performances were: a vivacious multi-role-playing rendition of the parody of ‘jolly-hockeysticks’ adventures in “Daisy Pulls It Off” set in a 1920s girls’ boarding school; two different, but equally compelling, versions of the gritty, definitely post-watershed, Thatcher-era play “Road” set ‘up North’, which calls for actors to move among and interact with audience members in promenade style; two fraught and emotionally-draining versions of the same husband-and-wife scene from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” set at the time of the Salem witch trials in the late 17th century; and two different and contrasting segments taken from the Gothic-horror “The Woman in Black”, just in case the students had not already unsettled and played with our nerves, emotions and thoughts enough during the course of the evening.
These two Showcase evenings exemplified for me many of the things we are rightly proud of at Prince Henry’s: the talented, hard-working and accomplished students at the school who constantly aspire to improve themselves; the dedicated, tireless, professional and skilled teachers, ably backed up by non-teaching staff; supportive and community-minded parents – on these Showcase evenings, the parents, family and friends did not just flit in and out to see their own children perform, but stayed on to watch the other performances, encouraging these students as well with the all-important feedback they need ahead of their Practical Exams in a couple of weeks’ time.
Mr K Watson
Vice Chairman of Governors