"The plays the thing"

This term the Year 11 Drama class, alongside some of our Year 13s, took a trip to the National Theatre to see Shakespeare’s most famous and renowned play: Hamlet.

Starring Hiran Abeysekera (Life of Pi) with Ryan Elsworth playing his late father, (for Wednesday fans he plays Enid’s father) Robert Hastie’s re-

imagined Hamlet designed the titular character to reminisce the corruption and instability of the typical young mind of today.

There has been an age-old debate as to whether Hamlet’s madness was real or feigned and, to my preference, this production deemed it to be real.

The English Literature sixth form students, who have been studying Hamlet for their Paper 1, were thrilled for this opportunity to see the live production as critical interpretations count as a large sum of the marks in the essay section of it.

One query many students had was the role of Ophelia played by Francesca Mills; “I felt she played the part as though she were a child and for me this took something away from her role as the tragic victim - she played the role of comic relief instead, which, to me, isn’t appropriate for the plot.” Stated one student, Isabel.  

For many of the students who haven’t studied the play in depth, the Shakespearean language may be too complex for them to understand the plot and without having to google it in the interval. So perhaps a director’s downfall, when attempting to encourage a new generation of drama students and actors, is the matter of the historical playwright's language and works being simply too out of date for younger generations to understand.

Overall, this was a great educational experience for our students to immerse themselves in their studies. Miss Piperaki truly seemed to enjoy the performance - blocking the view of the actors for myself and other students during her prolonged standing ovation and, as any teacher would, Miss Miller took the most pride in having her group behave better than the school in front of us!