“The boys were absolutely brilliant tonight,” wrote Director of Drama Victoria Buse, concerning the Peter Cook Cup, Radley’s biennial monologue competition since 2018. “They all gave super performances and should be really proud of what they achieved.”
Adjudicated by actor Steve Dineen, the competing boys embodied the words, costumes, and spirits of characters found across English-language fiction – from the conflicted protagonists of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and Ryan Calais Cameron’s Retrograde, to the broken antiheroes of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad and Todd Phillips’s Joker. The three awarded candidates alone represented three separate forms of dramatic media – the stage, the screen and the digital world.
Fresh from a turn as the character in the Remove Play Sherlock Holmes, Hugo (R, F) again treated the audience to his startling portrayal of Professor Moriarty, embodying the iconic BBC iteration as played by Andrew Scott. Deriving his monologue from the 2012 episode The Reichenbach Fall, Hugo relished his villainous persona – “Every person has their pressure point; someone that they want to protect from harm…” – and earned the position of Lower School Runner-Up.
Finlay (6.1, K) donned a ringmaster’s outfit to perform a piece from The Amazing Digital Circus, an Australian animated series whose online instalments have earned viewerships numbering in the hundreds of millions. The sixth-former simultaneously played Caine, the artificial intelligence governing the titular Circus, and the virtual lackey Bubble. For his portrayal of Caine’s software-frying descent into megalomania (from a 2026 episode titled ‘hjsakldfhl’), Finlay won the position of Upper School Runner-Up.
The evening’s ultimate winner was Lex (6.1, L), who played George from Anna Jordan’s 2018 play The Unreturning. His character, a World War 1 army private descending into the murk of shell-shock, is returning to his wife Rose on the comfortable Scarborough seaside, after the near-obliteration of his Western Front section. Lex’s astonishing acting resulted in his worthy victory, continuing the legacy of the contest’s namesake as an example of incredible Radley solo performance. Steve Dineen noted afterwards: “There were some wonderful original pieces that I have not seen before, which is always a joy. The standard of performances was incredibly high, meaning any one of the performers was in with a chance of getting placed, making the adjudication very tricky.”
