Latest News

4 July 2014

Charlotte Tatam, Head of Drama, reports on a project at Southwark Playhouse as part of the 2014 East Dulwich Literary Festival.

Students from the Year 9 Drama GCSE group were fortunate to have a rare opportunity to work alongside theatre professionals and perform a brand new play for the public at the Southwark Playhouse as part of this year’s East Dulwich Literary Festival. 

Stewart Melton, who co-ordinated the project for Southwark Playhouse, was keen that the first ever show in the theatre’s newly-opened studio space should be something special, and the girls from HGAED really delivered.

Exploring the issues of 'home'

To create the play, Cathy Thomas, a member of both the Royal Court and Lyric’s writers' groups, and Tess Seddon, Co-Director of TheatreState, spent an initial two weeks of Drama lessons with our girls, exploring their ideas of home; the local area, safety and identity, in keeping with the theme of this year’s Literary Festival.

Cathy then went away and wrote the play Saturday Night Lights, based on the girls’ own feelings and experiences. With the script written, Tess, our director, worked with the students for a further six weeks, experimenting with different ways of staging the script.

Saturday Night Lights is a very non-traditional, non-naturalistic script, and the staging ideas gave the girls a chance to understand lots of non-traditional ways for actors to tell a story. 

Movement coach

A movement coach was brought in for two sessions, and ultimately Tess arrived at the concept of our teenage characters having to endure the indignities of a little children’s birthday party, complete with musical chairs, as they performed. This juxtaposed the characters’ desires for adulthood and freedom, with a physical context that saw them forced back into childhood. The resulting tension exploded in chaos and anarchy towards the end of the play. 

Access all areas

The students spent all day on the 2 July at Southwark Playhouse. They were given a tour, but not the kind of backstage tour that a theatre might offer to the general public: this was real “access all areas” stuff.

Our girls were able to take a peek into personal dressing rooms, and walk among the technical daily business of a working theatre. The students were then able to rehearse in their theatre space for the first time, and get used to the real set and props they would be using.

One of the challenges was discovering quite how hard it is to break a piñata, and even more so without various contents flying out and hurting the audience!  But this is what these final rehearsals are for.

First performance

There then followed the time-consuming technical rehearsals for sound and lighting which keenly demonstrated to our students that not every moment in an actor’s life is glamorous and fun; all part of the real-world experience.

Finally, at 4pm the first audience took their seats: a small group of staff from HGAED and Southwark Playhouse to give the girls a less intimidating first performance. A few hitches ironed out, the second show at 7pm was packed with parents, teachers, but also people the girls didn’t know at all.  It was a real public audience and our students performed like true professionals. All who saw it enthused at how well the girls had done and how enjoyable the show had been.

The students themselves will now go into their second year of GCSE Drama equipped with the genuine understanding of what is required to bring a professional performance to the stage. It’s experience that very few of their peers around the country will have, and must surely set them in good stead to aim for the very top grades.