Senior School » Co Curricular » Drama

Drama

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    Mr Robert Wickham
    P: (02) 9327 9417

Each year at Cranbrook, students from Years 7 -12 participate in as many as eight co-curricular productions. The repertoire ranges from classical plays to contemporary Australian plays and musical comedies. About half of these productions are based at Cranbrook and are performed with local girls' schools: SCEGGS Darlinghurst, Ascham and Kambala. Other productions are based at the girls' schools. In addition there are occasionally evenings of House drama. There is also usually a student-directed production each year.

Drama

The School competes annually in the Australian Globe Centre's Secondary School's Shakespeare Festival. Each year in Term 4 there is a hotly contested House Theatresports competition, the finals for which always draw capacity audiences to the War Memorial Hall. There are also a number of popular showcase evenings of classroom drama: a Years 9 and 10 evening that coincides with the opening of the School's Visual Arts Exhibition and two evenings of HSC Drama showcases.

Throughout the year Drama students attend several performances at venues such as the Opera House, Sydney Theatre and Belvoir Street Theatre. Each year, Years 11 and 12 students take out Sydney Theatre Company youth subscriptions. Students at Cranbrook are often invited to audition for professional productions both on stage and on the screen, a practice that the School supports.

Drama students at Cranbrook have many opportunities to work with notable visiting theatre practitioners. In 2003 Cicely Berry conducted a workshop on Shakespearean performance with Year 11 Drama classes and Max Lambert oversaw rehearsals of the musical, Canterbury Tales. In 2004, Rowena Balos led workshops on vocal production with Year 9 classes and Old Cranbrookians John Gaden and John Rayment worked with students on the School's production of Hamlet. Kerry Walker worked with the School's entrants in the Australian Globe Centre's Secondary Schools' Shakespeare Festival. For three successive years, Cranbrookians have won sections in the state finals of this festival and have also been selected to appear in the festival's National Youth Production.