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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 9:38:30 GMT
So as it's GCSE results day, and I'm bored, I thought why not talk about what plays you did at school and whether you loved/hated them...in English or Drama class. And whether/how long it took you to learn to love them again....
I HATED my GCSE drama class, not least for the fact I was dressed in an actual net curtain for 'A midsummer night's dream' (I was a fat kid, it was not a good look) and that in my rough comp 'rehearsals' were and excuse to bunk off and beat each other up.
Plays I still loved from school: Othello, Dream. Plays I hated then and hate now: Romeo and Juliet, Blood Brothers. Plays I eventually grew to love: Hamlet (ok that was University but I hated that little Dane for a long time)
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 9:44:36 GMT
A level English - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
This accounts for my strong aversion to Tom Stoppard. I still avoid his plays because of my school exposure to this text. Although I saw a production decades later and enjoyed it.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 9:58:18 GMT
O Level English - Twelfth Night (novel was 1984), I remember having to do a personal project for the exam, which I did on Beckett. A Level English Lit - King Lear (plus Emma, The Waste Land etc.), there were numerous other small essays we had to do that were assessed, such as Equus (or was that O Level?), Ways of Seeing etc. Plays/Musicals I was in at school - My Fair Lady, Bartholomew Fair (Ben Jonson), Black Comedy (Peter Shaffer) etc.
Too early for the school I was at to be teaching Drama separately. I'd say that I got something out of all of them.
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Post by samuelwhiskers on Aug 24, 2017 10:08:41 GMT
GCSE: Taming of the Shrew (loved it then, like it now). A Level: King Lear as part of comparative lit with Thousand Acres (I like Lear fine but I've seen approx 5000 productions of it and I never need to see another. See also: Midsummer Night's Dream).
I didn't really study much Shakespeare in school, though I was reading the plays and seeing productions outside of school from a young age. I used to love Macbeth and 12th Night, and hate the "boring" histories. Now my favourite play is Richard II.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 10:11:47 GMT
Ooh I'm jealous anyone did a Henry!
We also never did any extracurricular plays at School (did I mention it was rough as...) which does make me sad as I'd have liked to do some kind of performance. However on that note my Primary School Choir Master introduced me to the world of musical theatre...he was shall we say slightly camp.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 10:21:32 GMT
O Level English - Henry V A Level English - Hamlet, Macbeth, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Acting at school - The Duke in Darkness (Patrick Hamilton) The local newspaper review praised everyone else but said that, as the malevolent duke, I was more like the wicked queen in Snow White. The Masters (C.P.Snow) I had two lines, as the Porter, and forgot one of them (Your car is here, Sir) thus depriving the main character of his motivation to exit the stage. My Three Angels (Sam and Bella Spewack) Had a panic attack in rehearsal of our opening descent from the roof so, in performance, the other two convicts arrived onstage from above and I shuffled on from the wings. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Bertolt Brecht) Hours before the first performance I engaged in a teat pipette fight in Chemistry which permanently scarred my wrist so I had to perform with one arm in a sling. Rosmersholm (Henrik Ibsen) The most disastrous of all, with the smallest and least experienced cast, one of whom failed to learn their lines. Ubu Enchained (Alfred Jarry) My one successful role was Ma Ubu, evil Queen of Po-Land. Summer Leavers' Revue (anon, various) My friend and I, in teeny trunks, were groped by two Frank N Furters who were selecting a partner. I loved it, my brother was outraged, the Headmaster's wife burst into hysterical laughter, and my participation was criticised because I wasn't actually leaving.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 10:31:18 GMT
Main memories of school Shakespeare:
Finding the name of the character Scroop in Henry IV pt 1 hilarious
Also in Henry - "I'll murder his wardrobe piece by piece" was unaccountably funny to us at the time
And I think Othello - we misheard "O enforce it" as a character called Owen Fawcett
Other memories of studying plays - really not appreciating Waiting For Godot
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 10:52:11 GMT
Primary School, late sixties/early seventies had us troop into the hall to listen to 'the school radio', usually a programme called 'music and movement' where you pretended to be trees and stuff whilst trying to retain at least some semblance of four year old dignity.* As Tvcream explain "Arcane Swiss sociology exported as near-naked prancing on splintering wooden floors. For decades after World War Two primary school kids had their cognitive skills ostensibly honed by the aural equivalent of cod liver oil: a frosty-voiced BBC matron encouraging them to act out an activity in time with a piece of music picked out in lacklustre fashion on a battered piano. Quick, get into a space, it's time to do ‘our wide dance’." www.tvcream.co.uk/bric-a-brac/a-m-bric-a-brac/m-is-for-bric-a-brac/music-and-movement/* For music it was 'Singing Together', with such glories as 'Michael Finnegan'.
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Post by crowblack on Aug 24, 2017 10:58:41 GMT
I'm very jealous! My school was pretty crap regarding the arts - it was very science oriented, which was unusual for a girls' school. My brother's school was the opposite - they had a stage and used it, and did lots of Tennessee Williams, which I'd have loved to have done but they loathed (as I discovered when I got him a coveted ticket to the Maxine Peake Streetcar last year - he refused to go). In English, we did wall-to-wall Shakespeare, from ancient, censored textbooks (the teacher had to write the rude bits on the blackboard for us to copy in!), and loads of Arthur Miller. I've avoided most of them since, apart from The Tempest and Macbeth, which I still love. I remember much joy when the teacher put Derek Jarman's Tempest on the school video without, presumably, having watched it first, and hurriedly switched it off when Ferdinand emerged full-frontal from the sea.
We did do drama, but not as an o-level, just reading it out loud and the odd bits of improv in a attic room, and did some unlikely things - Victoriana like The Bells and The Ticket of Leave Man (no kidding!). A bunch of us pestered to be allowed to do Theatre Studies, though we were warned (rightly, as it turned out) many universities back then didn't take it seriously as an A-level. The curriculum for that seemed to be John Osborne. Chekhov, Turgenev, though in the design/costume option, where you could pick your own, I did Antigone and some Brecht. At the time, I was into stuff like Edward Bond and Genet and it was the Nicholas Hytner / Ian McDiarmid era at the nearby Royal Exchange and it seemed like a different world - it was that, much of it being discovered through TV programmes like Arena and arts reviews (and being taken to Manchester by middle-class neighbours who were colleagues of Hytner's parents!) rather than school, that really got me into theatre.
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Post by crowblack on Aug 24, 2017 11:04:45 GMT
For music it was 'Singing Together', That was good! Jarvis Cocker did an interesting programme on it on Radio 4 a few months ago.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 11:09:10 GMT
Oh our music department seemed to implode when I was in Year 9, so I was distinctly lacking in any musical education. I do remember watching Tosca on VHS though... and we had a Commitments poster on the music room wall!
Another thing that will date some of us...educational TV shows...my 90s kids who remember 'Look and Read' from Primary School (and the most genius 'Through the Dragon's Eye' and 'Geordie Racer')
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 11:09:27 GMT
* For music it was 'Singing Together', with such glories as 'Michael Finnegan'. This had a book of songs for each term, which were all learned over the course of the series and at the very end of the term came the climactic culminatory moment when each class member cast their vote for their favourite song, in a spooky fore-shadowing of our interactive culture of today! Most of the songs were very jolly but my strong favourite was Black Sir Harry (Black was his plume/ Black was his shield / ...) sung to a tune of notes apparently composed in a random order, somewhere between a minor key and atonality. Everyone else in the class, including Mrs Wimbush, HATED Black Sir Harry but he had seduced me. So, in our class's end-of-term vote, Black Sir Harry came last with just two votes, cast by me and the boy who sat beside me, who I suspected was supporting me rather than the dark knight.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 11:11:54 GMT
Well. I'll have to try to go back through the rolodex of my brain to remember some of the plays we covered at school but I do recall being a showstopping Joseph in 'Joseph & The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat' which my parents found most disconcerting as I believe they came into it thinking that it was a version of the nativity. Not altogether the Joseph they were expecting. They were fabulously entertained though. Probably drunk I imagine.
I was often the Maggie Smith of my school productions. Mince on, steal the entire show. Mince off.
I once recall beginning the week's run of the pantomime as the Genie in 'Aladdin' in two scenes and ended the week in seven.
Not sure why because I'm usually rather shy and retiring.
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Post by anita on Aug 24, 2017 11:24:11 GMT
we did the Daniel Jazz inmusic.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 11:26:26 GMT
Primary School, late sixties/early seventies had us troop into the hall to listen to 'the school radio', usually a programme called 'music and movement' where you pretended to be trees and stuff whilst trying to retain at least some semblance of four year old dignity.* Yes, I remember how we had to freeze at times, which was difficult. Someone in the village doing dance teacher training started similar classes for primary age kids in the village hall. Numbers soon dwindled to four regulars - Kitty (very talented and wore a proper leotard), two other girls (average) and me (um, enthusiastic). At the end of the year, the teacher explained that sadly she was moving away so this was the very last class. She told Kitty that she very much hoped that she would persevere with dancing. She asked the other two girls if they would have continued to attend the classes if they'd continued, and they said: Probably. Then, she said to me: And what about you? to which I replied: Oh, yes! at which the teacher paused before asking: Why?
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Post by vdcni on Aug 24, 2017 11:30:43 GMT
Romeo and Juliet for GSCE and hated every minute of it. It might have helped if we had seen a production but the best they managed was the BBC 70's version and the Zeffirelli film, neither of which engaged me particularly.
A-Level English was Hamlet, loved it and going to see the Stephen Dillane production helped kick start my interest in theatre, and Making History by Brian Friel which I didn't love at the time but would be interested in seeing a production of at some point.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 11:39:12 GMT
We did Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth in English, but I can't remember which was GCSE and which was SATS. I didn't do English for A-level, but believe our school studied King Lear. I can't for the life of me remember what we studied as our contemporary play for GCSE, I just know it wasn't An Inspector Calls or Our Country's Good, but I do remember covering a lot of ground in GCSE drama including My Mother Said I Never Should, Steel Magnolias, and Steaming.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 12:07:01 GMT
Oh I also did 'Our Country's Good' for English A Level (I think) My English A Level was a particular kind of torture for it's dreaded 'Poetry Anthology' around 50 pages of poems to be analysed....I have a talent for English but that talent does not extend to poetry.
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Post by michalnowicki on Aug 24, 2017 12:24:10 GMT
We've done things a bit differently back home. When I was finishing high school you had to make a presentation for Polish, based on a subject from a list. My choice of a subject was something along the lines of "Existential problem in Theatre of The Absurd". I've presented based on: 'Exit the King' by Eugène Ionesco, 'King Ubu' by Alfred Jarry, Tango by Polish writer, Sławomir Mrożek (look at all the squiggly bits!) and 'Waiting for Godot' by Samuel Beckett. That was fun.
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Post by viserys on Aug 24, 2017 12:29:35 GMT
It's a comfort to read that so many of you did King Lear in Britain, too. I thought our teacher was particularly idiotic to choose King Lear (just because the local theatre was doing it that season and he could drag us there) as I felt no connection whatsoever to the cranky old bloke and always thought we should have done something with a more youthful lead that would have appealed to us - Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet for example.
That said, my last two years of A-Level English were a joke in Germany. Our teacher was some ex-hippie who'd get us to "analyze" song lyrics from his favorite hippie bands of the 70s, but wouldn't know who Charles Dickens was if he walked up to him and slapped him in the face.
But I was blessed with two good English teachers earlier on: One lady who had been born in England and who was actually able to tell us something about Britain, British life, etc. (believe it or not, but there are English teachers in Germany who've never set a foot onto your island) and one guy who really really insisted on us to pronounce the "th" properly, so we didn't end up with ze cliche German accent.
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Post by londonmzfitz on Aug 24, 2017 12:33:13 GMT
I had Taming of the Shrew which I loved; it was running in London at the Shaw Theatre at Euston, and we were taken there on 5 November 1974 to see it. Susan Hampshire as Kathrine, Nicky Henson as Petruchio. My first theatre outing (apart from a panto with our Cilla at The Palladium).
And Merchant of Venice, which the year group acted out. Not me, tongue tied and shy, but the other girls at my Convent school ....
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 12:36:44 GMT
When I was finishing high school you had to make a presentation for Polish For O level History, we each had to research a personally chosen topic and submit a long paper and do a timed essay from notes with a day's notice of the essay title. The topic I first proposed was The Polish Partitions, which sounded quite exciting, but the teacher just laughed and asked if it was about curtain design. He then said I wouldn't find enough books to study it. So I did The Struggle for Africa instead.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 12:41:18 GMT
I did Religious Studies A level, which was taught in our intensely secular school much like an extended History lesson- as in these are the beliefs and history of x religion etc. Until our usual teacher went on maternity leave and was replaced with a lay preacher....he was known to shout "Boy knows his Bible!!" if someone got a quote correctly....
Meanwhile our Law teacher had the strongest West-Wales accent imaginable, to the point it took us weeks to work out 'Law Lawns' were in face 'Law Lords' not a place outside court everyone was hanging out on.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 12:45:21 GMT
So I did The Struggle for Africa instead. This was fascinating but, from reading the reference books, I assumed that the Boers were an African tribe. I found it very peculiar that they were led militarily against the British by a Dutchman, Daniel Kruger. I decided that this African tribe had bought in a European mercenary because of his special skills in fighting the Brits. When the penny finally dropped, my overview of this colonial period had to be drastically revised.
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Post by lynette on Aug 24, 2017 13:13:16 GMT
O level Macbeth A level Othello and Antony and Cleopatra We read a Shakespeare in class very year...in detail. And we put on a drama comp in the lower part of the school, extracts from Shakespeare and then the school play was always a Shakespeare until my last year when we did Antigone, the French one. We didn't touch anything remotely modern. So for everything not Shakespeare I raised myself as they say. Even at uni plays were not explored as much as the other stuff.
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