IN Term 4 of 2019, the students of 10A and 7A English collaborated on a creative development of The Tempest, a Shakespeare play. The Tempest is about Prospero, the duke of Milan who is usurped by his brother and exiled from Milan. Prospero and his three-year-old daughter, Miranda were sent on a boat out into the ocean. Prospero and Miranda landed on an island where they met Sycorax and Caliban who were the inhabitants of the island. Prospero took over the island and he and Miranda have been living there for eleven years since. By chance, Prospero's brother and some other nobles happened to be passing the island. Prospero used his magic to create the illusion of a storm, so that the nobles think that their boat is about to crash and they all jump out and swim to shore. When they are on the island, Prospero uses Ariel, a spirit of the island to control and manipulate them and from there the story unfolds.

In term four, Stuart's year seven class and his year ten class merged to do this. At first, we did not have a distinct idea of what we were going to do, and I wasn't sure that the whole thing would even work, but as we progressed it became a lot clearer of what we were going to do. The first class that we had working on the Tempest was without the year tens and Stuart gave us a brief rundown of The Tempest and then we discussed different ways that we could interpret the play.

In the next few classes, which we had with the year 10s, we did some exercises with the language that Shakespeare uses so that we could understand some of the language in the script. After that, we did a brief synopsis of the play where we each played a character for a scene and then we swapped with another person so that we could get a feel for what some of The Tempest is like.

Then, in the next week, Stuart organised the 7s and 10s into groups, each group was allocated a scene to work on and eventually perform. All the year sevens were actors and the year tens were directing us. Most of the groups had about half year sevens and half tens. In the first session working with our groups, my group read through the scene and talked about what was being said and how the character's stance is in the scene and how that changes the dynamic of the scene throughout. After a few sessions we had a reasonably good idea of how we were going to do our scene, but some things were challenging, for example, because there were four year tens each with a different idea of how they saw the play, so sometimes it was quite hard to decide what to do. Also, at first it was sometimes challenging to understand what the language that Shakespeare used meant.

After a few weeks, all of the year tens left to do work experience for two weeks so that they couldn't direct us. By then, all of the groups had a relatively good idea of how they were going to do their scene, so Stuart just gave us advice on what we could do to improve. In that week we mostly just worked on memorising our lines and we also just rehearsed and rehearsed to get any final things polished off. The final thing that we did before the actual performance was to work out the costuming and set design. It wasn't that hard to think of the costumes and set design because most of the groups had a fairly good idea of what their costumes and set would look like. Before this, I had never really thought about what the characters costumes would look like or what the set would be like, but I feel that when a character has a costume, it makes them feel a lot more alive.