Figure 1.--These boys are engagedcin a dress rehersal for the school play at Southwell Preparatory School.

Full-scale drama productions are a popular annual event where students can experience the discipline of rehearsal and the excitement of the opening night. Theatresports provide a less formal forum for dramatic performance. Various schools receive national recognition for the high calibre of their Shakespearean or other specialized drama productions.

Allanah Milne--Singer and Actress

Allanah is an enthusiastic thespian who has been involved with many aspects of drama, both within the school and in the wider community. In Cashmere High School's major production, West Side Story, she won the coveted role of Anita, performing with all that Puerto Rican beauty's energy and zest. The August holidays saw a complete change of image as Allanah took on the role of Meg, a nice but scatterbrained witch who could never get her spells right, in the Canterbury Children's Theatre production of The Meg and Mog Show. Since then, Suffrage Year performances have been fitted in around Allanah's studies, and she looks forward to performing under the stars in Summer Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.

Allanah enjoys the audience response and adrenalin rush that go with live performance, and plans to gain as much experience as possible over the next two years, when she will be old enough to enter the New Zealand School of Drama. We wish her well.

Lymphad, Cashmere High School, 1993

Theatre Sports

The theatre sports teams have participated in a variety of events this year, some competitive but most arranged for the enjoyment of participants and spectators alike. The Bayfield competition saw the honours shared between two talented teams, and our players have been responsible for the invention of several new games--not easy in an activity overflowing with original minds and lateral thinkers! The rest of you may think we are mad but we have a lot of fun and look forward to new recruits next year.

Lymphad, Cashmere High School, 1993

Theatre/Drama

Simon Holtham, Hayden Mackley, Josh Cameron, Philip Martin 1997. A year of opportunity. A year of decision. A year of enchanted tropical islands, ethereal spirits, mental monsters, warped wizards, possessed princes and pure princesses. 1997 was a year of Shakespeare.

It all began as a midsummer's night dream, and passed through much ado about nothing, through to what some would say was a comedy of errors, to a final finished product that proved all's well that ends well. Following a recent popular revival of Shakespeare with great films such as Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, and Twelfth Night, we were inspired to repeat the 1995 trip to the Secondary Schools‘ Shakespeare Festival in Wellington. With a group of fifteen, roughly equal amounts of boy and girl, measure for measure, we began as a loose group of wide-eyed aspiring thespians, and evolved into an elite team of highly-trained dramatics (some over-dramatics). Under the brilliant directorship of Miss Fitzgibbon, we adapted Shakespeare's bittersweet ‘tragicomedy' The Tempest, into a 20 minute dynamic theatre production of drama, music and lights.

The Tempest, when intensely psycho-analysed, betrays prominent characteristics of Freudian homogeneity, intertwined with self-evident conflict of spiritual and physical elements. In a surreal microcosmic stage setting, the play explores worldly themes of revenge and redemption, control and chaos, greed and selflessness, liberty and servitude, ethereality and tangibility, the merging of good and evil, and the overruling influence of an unseen force in our lives. Loose eh, coach? Anyway, in order to take an entirely fresh and new look at the play, as well as showing Shakespeare's timelessness, we gave the play a kind of Sixties Science Fiction theme, in the tradition of programmes like Star Trek and Lost in Space. Thus, the island became an uninhabited planet in a far-flung galaxy, the ships became a star-fleet, the swords became phasers, and the tempest became an asteroid storm.

After many long hard nights (more than twelve) of practising and fund-raising ventures, including several performances in Oamaru in the last week, we finally left for Wellington on Queen's Birthday Weekend. It was a winter's tale of a long trip up in the vans and on the ferry, everybody getting to know each other rather too well, and we finally stepped off the boat into the wind and the driving rain of the capital. To cut an extraordinarily long and incredibly interesting story short (we're going to make a film out of it), we spent the next two days watching other plays, attending workshops, socialising, shopping, shrew-taming, and praising Burger King, as you like it. The workshops, on various aspects of acting, directing, dance and music, were invaluable, and the brilliance and innovation of the other Shakespeare plays showed us that while our school has come a long way in drama in the past three years, the standard in other schools around the country is very high, and improvements need to continue.

Anyway, it was never a dull trip, with a tempestuous ride back on the ferry, and more dramatics among the cast of truly Shakespearean proportions. We'd like to take this chance to thank GAP student Chris

The Waitakian, 1997.