English and Drama

Kenneth Grahame’s much-loved children’s tale follows Mole and his friends Ratty, Badger and Toad as they share reflections on fun times boating on the river, adventuring into the Wild Wood, battling weasels at Toad Hall and mishaps with motor cars.

David Barrett, Assistant to the Perse Theatre Practitioner in Residence, and English teacher Hannah Flowers directed the play, which attracted large audiences for its two-night run. Mr Barrett said: “We were keen for the pupils to try something with animal study, where they take the animals they’re trying to portray and start to humanise them as a drama exercise, so they were learning as they went along.

“We also wanted it to have the same amount of detail as a big show and that’s why we went to work on the set by painting the stage and creating a moat. We gave everything we could in terms of production values.”

Based around the character of Eva, the Diane Samuels play reflected on her struggles to come to terms with her past. After being brutally separated from her Jewish parents in Germany on the eve of World War II, nine-year-old Eva was brought to England via Kindertransport – a rescue effort that saw almost 10,000 Jewish children brought to the UK from across Nazi-controlled Europe in 1938 and 1939.

When Eva’s parents failed to escape Germany, she changed her name and began the process of denying her roots. It was only when her son discovered some letters in their attic that Eva was forced to confront the truth about the past.

English and drama teacher Kathryn Salmond, who directed Kindertransport, felt it was a vital subject to tackle.

She said: “It’s about a part of history that’s really important, especially with current events and discussions around antiSemitism, tolerance, religion and migration. Many of the Kindertransport children faced quite a lot of discrimination when they arrived here and the play questions the narrative of Britain being a welcoming place during the war.

“However, the main character has flashbacks talking about her love for Britain when Germany spat her out, so it’s a really complex play.”

Miss Salmond was thrilled with the cast’s performances and the work they had put into the production since rehearsals began last term. She added: “They learned a lot from it themselves, questioning what their characters were thinking and feeling and if there was anything they were unsure about, we delved into the history and had those conversations when they arose. There were some quite sensitive issues which we tried to work through thoughtfully.”

Adding extra resonance to the production, Robert Rayner (Upper Sixth) researched The Perse’s involvement in the Kindertransport programme, with the help of the school’s alumni and development team.

Governors’ meeting minutes from the era revealed the school committed to take up to five young refugees on full or partial bursaries.

Robert discovered two of the Kindertransport children educated at The Perse went on to have long and distinguished careers. Lucian Lewitter became Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, while Michael Steinberg moved to the USA and emerged as a renowned musicologist famed for his pre-concert talks.

Based on the classic Roald Dahl children’s novel, audiences flocked to catch the show over a run of four sensational performances, which featured a revolving stage and special effects for an added wow factor.

Perse Theatre Practitioner in Residence Andrew Pritchard, who directed the production, was thrilled the school’s talented actors and singers had the chance to perform Matilda JR, an abridged hour-long version of the original show.

He said: “Matilda is a truly excellent musical. It’s joyous and energetic and it’s a show that many people have wanted to do for a long time.

“To have a show that’s about chasing your dreams, building relationships, tackling massive challenges and overcoming huge obstacles felt like a really great production to do.” The production featured excellent performances from Katie Richards (Year 11) and Eloise Bowler (Year 9) as Matilda, Toby Owers and Ben Lewis (both Upper Sixth) as Miss Trunchbull and Horatia Duggan (Upper Sixth) and Isabella Li-Yan-Hui (Lower Sixth) as Miss Honey.

Mr Pritchard was delighted with how everything had come together from the music and choreography to the work of the cast and Technical Theatre Club crew since starting on Matilda at the start of term.

He said: “It’s the first musical we’ve been able to produce since 2019 and there was an expectation of it being a vibrant and positive event.

“With the matinee, we also had our first relaxed performance, which is a variation of the show adapted for audience members who might benefit from a more relaxed environment because we want to be as inclusive as we can.”

Meanwhile, a charity collection held alongside the performances raised around £600 for the DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal and East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices.

Based on Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella, it retold the story of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, reflecting on events in Homer’s The Odyssey from her point of view and exploring her life and those of her 12 maids. Perse Theatre Practitioner in Residence Andrew Pritchard directed The Penelopiad and felt the show’s message was relevant for current times.

He said: “We wanted to look at something classical through a contemporary lens for one of the first shows since lockdown where we’ve been able to engage with a live audience.

“Championing those female voices that are often suppressed or unheard and reflecting the world around us was integral to the choice of play.

“It’s something the students were really able to engage with and they did an amazing job. There was the entertainment and enjoyment of performance, but also having a subject they really wanted to tackle made it really impactful.”

Assistant director Talia Saeed (Upper Sixth) also took on a new role as the production’s inclusion, equality and diversity advisor, using an equity analysis template to consider how the play might impact various groups of people.

The challenging principal roles were double cast across the two performances with Chicko Ndumu (Lower Sixth) and Anna Bevens (Upper Sixth) playing Penelope in Hades, Maddie Austin (Upper Sixth) and Izzy Bevens (Lower Sixth) sharing the part of young Penelope and Corbin Abbasi and Ben Lewis (both Lower Sixth) taking on Odysseus.

Innovative staging and lighting developed by the technical crew created the parallels between the underworld of Hades and flashbacks to Penelope’s earlier life.

Meanwhile, a fundraising collection was held for Action Aid, a charity working to help women and girls living in poverty.

The play, by Silva Semerciyan, was based around a performance of Arthur Miller’s renowned work The Crucible – a fictionalised representation of the 17th Century Salem Witch Trials – by a school drama company.

However, the main actor begins to ask questions about the portrayal of women in Miller’s play, and institutional inequality more widely, leading to clashes with the school authorities that see her undergo a disciplinary procedure which takes on the reflection of a ‘witch-hunt’. He said: “They were challenging themes for the cast to take on, but they were excellent. This was a play from the National Theatre’s Connections programme, which commissions playwrights to produce plays specifically for young people that deal with issues relevant to their age, so it felt like a perfect fit.

Drama teacher George Smith, who directed Witches Can’t Be Burned, was delighted with how the cast had thrown themselves into the production, having only begun rehearsals at the start of term. “The maturity with which they approached it was amazing. It wasn’t just hard work and talent, they were thoughtful and politically engaged, and to do all this in four weeks, I’m really proud of them.”

She took on a question based on literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s quote ‘The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker postulates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.’ For her work, Lily considered how author Maggie O’Farrell had taken William Shakespeare’s words and made them her own in her 2020 novel Hamnet, based on the imagined life of the Bard’s son of the same name, who died aged just 11 in 1596, in relation to his tragedy Hamlet.

She said: “I’m passionate about English and of the different questions, I thought this was the most interesting and philosophical. I like a big idea, so I was immediately drawn to it.”

Having already studied Hamlet in Lower Sixth, Lily read Hamnet on the recommendation of English teacher Deborah Vernon-Purvis and found it an “amazing” book that she wanted to explore further.

“It’s given an impetus to one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays,” she said. “Hamnet has a twin sister, Judith, and I’m a twin as well, so I found it very moving and very pertinent.

“I’d already written a lecture on grief and time in Hamlet and Hamnet before the competition, so I knew a lot of what I wanted to say. It was about reframing those ideas specifically for the idea of borrowing the language of another person.”

Lily was thrilled to discover she had been highly commended in the competition, especially as she hopes to gain a place reading English literature at Trinity College.

Her verse, entitled Teeth, was one of just 15 overall winning poems selected from more than 14,400 entries across the world in the competition, organised by The Poetry Society for young writers aged 11 to 17.

The awards were judged by contemporary poets Clare Pollard and Yomi Sode, who said of the winning poems: “After a period in which the burdens of the pandemic have often fallen so heavily on young people, we were moved by the beauty, fire and resilience of these poems. We know that the voices of this year’s winners will ring out, clear and urgent, over the coming years.”

Teeth will now be published in a special anthology as part of the prize. Alex said: “I was really surprised to win, but very happy. I’ve always liked to write, but we’ve been studying poetry in English lessons and this was something I did on a whim. Winning this competition is a real confidence booster.”

He clinched the Fiction Writer of the Year honour in the Shine School Media Awards for his work Alphonse’s Story – a tense tale set in the Louisiana swamplands in which the eponymous character recalls a time in his youth when a series of cotton plantation workers were suddenly transformed into tiny Voodoo dolls.

The judging panel included Dr Glenda Cooper, Senior Journalism Lecturer at the University of London, Elle magazine Editor-in-Chief Kenya Hunt and Liz Hunt, Daily Mail Assistant Editor (Features & Comment).

They commented that Neelkantha’s story was “an excellent piece of imaginative writing, evocative, gripping and the writer achieves a slow, tantalising build-up of horror. We really wanted to know what happened – and the climax surprised us all”.

Neelkantha’s submission featured in the Michaelmas 2021 edition of Synthetic Violet, the Perse student-led cultural and literary publication, which itself was shortlisted in the Shine Awards Best Magazine category.

He said: “I was absolutely astounded to win. I didn’t expect it because there were so many good writers, so I felt very honoured to receive the prize. It means a great deal to me.”

Neelkantha was motivated to write Alphonse’s Story after his parents told him about the “secrets and mystery” of Louisiana following a visit to the US state.

He said: “It inspired me to explore the concept of Voodoo, which is often portrayed as being about dolls. In my story, people get an inexplicable fever and become what Alphonse calls ‘strange mis-shapens’ as they are turned into Voodoo dolls themselves.”

He praised Synthetic Violet for providing a forum for Perse students to have their stories, poems, essays, reviews and artworks published.

“It’s a brilliant idea, for which I have to highly commend the editor Carole Tucker (Year 11), along with Mr Green (Perse Director of English & Drama).”

He came third overall in the individual speaker rankings out of around 70 participants in the online national round.

However, Djia and team-mate Ruairi Wallace (Year 9) narrowly missed out on making it through to the international final despite a strong performance from the pair arguing across three topics. These included the implementation of a political general knowledge test to decide who could vote, whether there should be schools specifically for LGBTQ+ students, and if hacking should be allowed for social protest.

Djia said: “Over the three topics, you do three speeches and each individual speech is judged. The better your speech, the more speaker points you get and then they are totalled up to get the overall score.

“We’d have loved to have gone through to the international final, but sometimes you get a tough topic and there were so many good teams taking part.

“Ruairi and I worked well as a team and we had really good fun competing with people from different schools around the country.”

The BAFTA-winning actor’s roles have included performances in TV shows such as The Royle Family and There She Goes and films including Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the Nativity series.

It was in a different role though, as patron of National Drama – the UK’s leading subject association for drama teachers and theatre educators - that Jessica visited The Perse for an event organised by the school’s English & drama department.

However, Jessica told students she had become increasingly passionate and aware of the vital part drama could play in society.

Jessica said: “I’ve begun to really appreciate how important drama is and what it does for children and adults and how it can transform the way you feel.” As such, she recently became an ambassador for Dramatic Recovery, a Liverpool-based organisation which uses drama and the arts to promote positive mental health and wellbeing through creative workshops.

For Ebrahim, the regional qualifier was his first taste of competitive debating with just 15 minutes to prepare for each topic. “Even though it was on Zoom, it was still an intense experience because it was very competitive with many people making great points. There were around 30 teams and there were just five that could qualify for the nationals.”

Taylor, who has been involved in school debating clubs since Year 7, also enjoyed taking part as the pair tackled topics including whether professional athletes should be viewed as role models and whether big film and TV roles should be recast with minority actors or if new roles should be created especially for them.

Emily Martinez-McCune (Lower Sixth) was joint second and Alice Wentzell (Lower Sixth) a finalist in the New College of the Humanities essay competition

William Walker (Year 9) was a finalist in the 11-14 age category of the Wicked UK Young Writers Awards.

Hannah Scotland and Elif Cektir (Year 11) were longlisted for National Theatre New Views Playwriting Competition.

Toby Collins (Upper Sixth) was highly commended for his entry to the National Theatre’s ‘New Views’ playwriting competition. Toby took part in a workshop with practitioners from the NT in the summer.

Emily Fowkes Bolt (Year 11) gained her Grade 8 Acting award from Trinity College, London.

All students in the Year 10 and 11 Drama sets passed their RADA Shakespeare certificate qualifications.

Harry Knight (Lower Sixth) was a participant in the final of the English-Speaking Union’s national public speaking competition. Paloma Bargh (Year 9) represented the school at the regional final of the Performing Shakespeare EnglishSpeaking Union competition having won the school’s internal final for this event.

Sorcha Brickel (Year 11) received a distinction in her LAMDA qualification, and Alicia Li-Yan-Hui (Year 10) and Isabella Li-Yan-Hui (Lower Sixth) performed with the National Youth Music Theatre.

Sanjana Bhatnagar, Rebecca Li and Alina Turchyn (all Year 11) were the winners of the first round of the EnglishSpeaking Union’s ‘Mace’ debating competition.

Catherine Balfour (Year 11), Julia Chandy and Olivia Howard (both Year 10) progressed through several rounds of the English-Speaking Union’s ‘Churchill’ public speaking competition – and narrowly missed out on competing in the national final.

Perse teams (at intermediate and senior level) were successful in the first rounds of ‘Youth Speaks’ public speaking competitions run by Rotary International.