Term 2 Drama Exploits

Ms Fisher’s high school drama classes were busy throughout all of term 2, putting on an assortment of productions for ISCT and the public alike. The IGCSE drama class participated as one of 38 schools in Cape Town’s Shakespeare Schools Festival, while the year 12 and year 13 classes performed self-devised pieces as part of their AS and A-level curricula respectively. 

The first production this term was the Year 12 devised piece, Be A Lady. Inspired by the 2020 Women’s Day Marches in Chile and the attached image – AS students are required to choose a “stimulus” on which to base their devised pieces – the class created a play that explores the struggles, pressure, and emotional distress of the expectation to establish oneself as a woman in the world, or, as the characters discuss in one scene, “settling down.” The piece was as physical as it was verbal, however; the dialogue often only hints at what can be seen best by the body language and positioning of each character. The result is a holistic – and sometimes disquieting – experience. 

The year 11s, with the guidance of Ms Fisher and a number of students in other grades, performed Macbeth at the Shakespeare Schools Festival on May 16th. Sharing a slot with Romeo and Juliet by Mitchell’s Plain High School, our IG students squeezed Macbeth’s intrigue and gory resolution into a crisp 45-minute slot, each level of political scheming unfolding at an intense pace. Especially impressive were the set pieces and costume design: the witches in their ghostly rags, the scraggly birch branches representing Birnam wood, and the dripping rag that covers Macbeth’s decapitated head – each simple but evocative.

Finally, the A-level students in year 13 adapted the myth of Eros and Psyche into a humorous short piece set in the modern day. In Hot and Soul, The “#1 playboy” Eros accidentally scratches himself with his own arrow, forcing himself to fall in love with Psyche, the arrow’s intended target, with disastrous consequences. The class chose as their inspiration the Kneehigh Theatre Company from Cornwall, England, described as “joyful, anarchic, and innovative” – the y13’s flashy, funny, musical piece was a perfect fit. 

Congratulations to everyone involved in these productions for a very successful term of drama!

– By Sam