Issue 8, January 2004 (Back to Contents)

Sam Pullen, Head of Drama, describes her year

“You boy! Yes you! Show me that ticket immediately!” Mr Campbell seizes a hapless youth and extracts him from the crowd at the door. Snatching the ticket and holding it aloft he declares triumphantly, “Fake! Look at that green!” Concerned at my husband’s over-zealous approach to his Front of House duties and afraid he might not yet have registered that we now colour-code play tickets according to which night of a performance it is, I lean in and whisper urgently, “No, no… It’s Wednesday – it’s supposed to be green”.

“Wrong shade” he hisses. “Clearly scanned!” And the aforementioned youth, having begged someone else’s legitimate ticket, applied a little computer wizardry to copy a version and presented it as his own, is sent smartly away. As Director of Drama, I am left delighted (if a little disapproving of course) that enthusiasm for this latest of Radley productions is so great that boys will resort to such means to get in!

It could of course be something to do with the fact that Radley has joined forces this year for this version of Kander and Ebb’s hit Broadway musical, Cabaret, with the girls of Downe House School. Working with them has been huge fun and quite apart from their undoubted talent on the performance front, they have of course injected a level of glamour to the proceedings that has been hitherto unknown. (Shells in dresses, however pretty, just don’t have the same impact!)

It could also be due to the Drama and Music departments working so productively together these days – Stephen Clarke’s move into teaching from the world of professional Opera has heralded an exciting sense of what it is to aim for truly professional performance standards. For Cabaret, the boys in the band have played alongside professional adult musicians who teach at the college and the resulting sound has been wonderfully exciting. We are also drawing from the professional world now in terms of set and lighting design; our latest Theatre Manager, Ross Cogswell, hails from the world of television and in the brief year he has been able to spend with us, has taught the boys a huge amount on the technical and design front; they now have a real sense of what can be achieved visually on stage and audiences have been universally complimentary about what they have seen as a result.

Whatever the reason for this surge of enthusiasm and interest, one sad fact remains; a large percentage of Radleians who wanted to see this most recent production has actually not been able to get in at all. Cabaret was entirely sold out four weeks in advance of the first night; we eventually closed the waiting list for tickets when it reached 100 and faced the fact that the ageing Old Gym with its seating capacity of 156 simply cannot cope with the new demand of far larger audiences wanting to see Theatre done on a rather more ambitious scale perhaps than in the past. Over eighty boys were involved in the show itself, either on-stage as one of the two casts that performed on alternate nights, in the band or working as part of the technical crew, but an awful lot more who would dearly like to have seen it simply couldn’t be accommodated. We look forward to the advent of our new theatre with bated breath…

Much of this new enthusiasm for the Performing Arts is doubtless generated through the opportunity the boys now have to study them alongside the more traditional academic subjects. GCSE Drama, introduced by David Edwards, has now been up and running for seven years - the subject is so popular that numbers have to be strictly limited – and 2003 saw the first cohort of A level Theatre Studies students emerge from Radley. This latter group leave behind them memories of some unique performances, often (though not always) stemming from practical work offered for examination. Original devised work such as Hotel Elysium, a piece based on the Chekhovian themes of dreams and disenchantment, and scripted work such as Sophocles’ Oedipus earned these particular boys a clutch of high grades, it’s true, but far more importantly produced some magnificent and inspiring performances.

It is often the case that boys on such courses acquire a real passion for the work which extends beyond the course itself and last year saw A level enthusiasts choosing to spend their Wednesday afternoon Option slots exploring the surreal world of Stephen Berkoff’s theatre. In mid-December and only two weeks after most of them had finished work on the major College production Another Country, seven boys performed a highly original and very inventive version of Berkoff’s play Metamorphosis (an adaptation of the Kafka short story about a man who turns overnight into a beetle). The contrast in the two plays could not have been more extreme; the former is highly naturalistic and set in a boys’ public school in the 1930’s – the second is an extremely physical, expressionistic piece set largely in a hellish cage of the characters’ own making!

Metamorphosis took place in the Studio Theatre, a flexible “black box”space in the David Rae Smith Building (now in its fourth year of existence) which is used for the teaching of Drama and Theatre Studies as well as providing a small-scale venue for more intimate and often experimental work. A great pleasure as Director of Drama is to stand outside the Studio Theatre door during the interval of such performances and listen to the enthusiasm with which younger boys discuss and dissect the work they are watching. Inevitably their own work is informed by the exciting and often challenging work they see in the studio and whilst the “Oops – I’ve Lost my Trousers and Here Comes the Vicar” genre of Social Plays is still widely popular, we are starting to see signs of bolder and more sophisticated work emerge here too.

Amongst the directors of this year’s Haddon Cup were eight who were studying Theatre Studies at A level, and the plays on offer ranged from broad comedy to two intensely poignant and highly stylised pieces based on the Holocaust and the First World War respectively – the latter of which actually won the competition for G Social. It was good to see stigs having an experience which not only had a socially valuable purpose in bonding them together during their first few weeks at Radley, but was also an early opportunity for them to engage in something that was genuinely theatrically exciting too.

The First World War also provided us with the material for last summer’s (happily very successful) venture to the Edinburgh Festival. A party of thirty of us, joined on this occasion by four girls from Dauntsey’s School in Wiltshire, spent a memorable eight days at The Fringe, performing Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s 1960’s classic, Oh What a Lovely War. Considering that the average attendance at Fringe shows is only in the region of 2.5 people (an image to conjure with in itself) we were delighted to have average houses of 56, including full houses of 92 for our last two performances. The experience of meeting other young people with similar interests, performing to more objective paying audiences and just being part of such a huge and stimulating international festival is obviously of incalculable worth to the boys, two of whom declared resolutely at the end of the trip that it actually had been the best week of their lives!

This year has seen our actors performing outside Radley once again. As part of the National Theatre and Shell Connections scheme, we were invited to take our production of Philip Ridley’s new play Brokenville to the Ustinov Studio at Bath Theatre Royal. The reception it received was extremely gratifying but it was also a great opportunity for the boys to experience the “delights” of touring a production – loading and unloading lorries, struggling to set up and dismantle sets under timed conditions, performing in a strange venue and so on. It was also a chance to share in the work of other young companies and experience a whole wealth of new writing for which the scheme is justly acclaimed. We came away exhausted but once again, enriched.

A vital element of the study of Drama and Theatre is of course to see professional companies at work, and the ability to analyse live productions is a core skill at both GCSE and A level. It is one of the most popular elements of the course as it is not exactly a hardship to spend regular evenings at the theatre! Over the last few months boys have enjoyed a variety of trips ranging from those to intimate venues like the Pegasus Theatre in Oxford to see small-scale touring work such as Company of Angels’ Hannah and Hanna, to those to London which have included Jonathan Church’s Of Mice and Men at the Savoy Theatre and Katie Mitchell’s Three Sisters at the National, not to mention that perennial favourite with younger boys, The Woman in Black! We have also been over to Northampton’s Royal Theatre to see the National Theatre’s touring production of Threepenny Opera and down to Southampton’s Mayflower Theatre for a very interesting new play, Penny Gold’s When We Are Rich. The latter examines the different value systems of the Arab and Western worlds, and it is striking how actively and with what interest the boys seem to respond to these issues having seen them explored through live performance. Many a fascinating debate takes place on the coach on the way home!

It has been a busy twelve months for the Drama department, but by no means untypical. Apart from those productions already mentioned, there have been five more short plays for examination purposes. Rod Journeaux of the English department has proved his mettle directing a Shell version of that boys’ school staple Lord of the Flies plus a studio version with his Shell English set of Willy Russell’s Our Day Out. Ross Cogswell has directed a hilarious Remove production of John Godber’s Teechers (sic). I have been delighted to find colleagues keen to direct, and look forward to next term which will see David Edwards directing lower school boys in Journey’s End whilst I am kept busy with a 6.1 production of Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun. We are always delighted to welcome ORs at productions or even just to look around the department.

There are of course plenty of current Radleians keen to follow in the footsteps of Peter Cook and his ilk and we do seem to have a wealth of creative talent here. No fewer than three boys won places with the National Youth Theatre this year – Charles Furness-Smith, Edward Martineau and Charles Allen; Harry Elgood starred in the TV series That’ll Teach ’Em and ten boys performed impressively when we were visited by the casting agent for a new film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (We hear the results next month!)

Not all the most satisfying moments within a Drama department come from impressive performances however and the biggest triumphs can go almost unnoticed. They take the form of boys who are not always the most able or talented of performers finding within themselves, through the experience of being involved in the dramatic process, a new confidence, and that deeper sense of self-worth that can emerge from being part of a creative team. Often it is a gradual process; just occasionally it is dramatic; but always it is of immense value to the individual himself and something well worth taking away from his days at Radley.