12 February 2025
There can’t be many stages on which a play by Willy Russell has followed an adaptation of Disney’s Hercules in a single evening – but this very pairing made for double the fun in Woldingham’s auditorium on Monday 10 February.
Our Key Stage 3 Drama Club’s production of Hercules kicked off the evening’s entertainment. This tale of derring-do was performed by around 40 students and directed and choreographed by our Sixth Form Drama Ribbon Elena and Drama Ambassadors Alana, Charlotte, India and Ottie. With a wealth of talent in the club, the audience was treated to two Hercules, and other leading characters, as cast members switched roles part way through, as well as a supergroup of muses who moved the tale along in song.
Some of the Hercules’ cast returned to the stage after the interval in very different guise as three ensembles of drama and performing arts scholars brought us three well-acted extracts from Our Day Out, a musical set in the 1970s about a secondary school trip. There was little in the way of heroics, but plenty of, shall we say, 'high jinks' as the students travelled from Liverpool to Conwy in Wales, via escapades at a café and a zoo. That the final scene took place at a funfair was fitting on an evening that was lots of fun for both audience and performers.
A few weeks earlier, Year 10 drama students made Director of Drama Miss Stacey Williams “very proud” with an incredibly moving performance of extracts from their GCSE set text - Mark Wheeller’s hard-hitting play I Love You, Mum – I Promise I Won’t Die, which documents the tragic story of high-achieving Croydon school boy Daniel Spargo-Mabbs, who lost his life after taking a fatal dose of MDMA at an illegal rave. You can see some photos of the performance in the gallery below.
