2020 Senior Drama Production

Our drama teacher, Miss Missen, chose the brechtian style show Bare by Toa Fraser for our drama class to perform. She chose this particular production because it is mainly formed of monologues, and at the time we were unsure of what would happen with Covid 19, and it was going to be hard to perform an interactive script if we had to social distance, so doing a production where it is only one or two maximum people onstage at a time for lines was needed.

Our drama class was at first incredibly skeptical about performing monologues, as looking at a paragraph of words and being told to memorise them, and the fact as well that we would have to perform it onstage by ourselves and interact with the audience was very daunting. However, as we continued to learn our lines and learned more about this production and style of theatre, we became more and more motivated to do it. The turning point for our class was going to see the sequel to our production, Pure and Deep. Our drama class really enjoyed watching it, and seeing how the characters connected in the sequel and how a typical brechtian style performance was portrayed really motivated us to continue learning our lines and bringing our characters to life. 

We spent five months preparing for this production; learning more about the brechtian theatre style, learning our lines, piecing together our costumes and the set, and building up our characters for this show.

We really enjoyed learning about a new theatre style, and seeing how all of our characters connected to each other in the production was fascinating, as the more we read our scripts the more we began to understand. 

Our class felt really good about our final work. Most of us found it a lot easier than expected, and I think many of us actually really enjoyed getting to be onstage by ourselves. The feedback from the audiences was great, many thought it was very professionally done, and a few said they wanted to see a sequel.

It was a very fun experience to be part of, we had an amazing teacher and director to help guide us through, the cast worked well together, and we all really enjoyed ourselves and would do it again.

Hayley Esslemont, Year 12 Student