OBERON, Titania, the lovers and the fairies finally had their time on stage when pupils at Lewes Old Grammar School staged a musical rock and roll version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream last week.
After two years of stage darkness thanks to the pandemic, the LOGS actors played to full houses every night when they performed Dream, Dream, Dream, a zany London-in-the-1950s version of the Shakespeare classic comedy.
While lover Lysander becomes teddy boy Johnny Tempest and Demetrius a delightfully square RAF pilot called Dennis, Hermia becomes Belle, who refuses to marry Dennis whom her father has chosen for her and is the embodiment of the wilful “teenager” – a newly-minted creation of the 1950s. The final lover, Shakespeare’s Helena, becomes Judy, played by Emily Roberts whose honeyed voice the audience fell in love with.
The fifties theme continued with the comedic “workers” (including a gas fitter, a Rediffusion TV repair man and a blue stockinged early feminist) led by Matilda Hannigan’s Bill (Bottom) Feeder and the group were in danger of stealing the show with their joyously silly am-dram preparations of their play within a play.
Year 7’s Raphael Phag-Udom was impressive as impish Puck, managing to remember an awful lot of complicated verse, and special mention also goes to the diminutive Lila Meiland, also only 11 (12?) who played the Hippolyta character, here named Polly and so very, very funny as a straight-talking East End girl, pricking any pomposity she encountered.
LOGS head of drama Ken Lawrence’s imaginative and original rendering of the play created lovely parts for many (the wonderfully camp tailor Steve Starveling gamely played by Freddie Russell and chatting actors’ slang Polari on every occasion comes to mind) and made the most of the melodious voices of Gracie Agnew, Georgia Packham and Liv Flower, ‘the Shangri-Logs’, who treated the audience to some fifties classics in between scenes.
Miles with Meaning: LOGS Students Go the Distance for Cancer Research UK Throughout March and April, students from Years 7 – 10 completed a 4K Race for Life in support of Cancer Research UK, a challenge that combined fitness, fun and fundraising. Every pupil embraced the challenge with incredible enthusiasm, showing determination and resilience whether they were running under bright
LOGS students visit Incredible Iceland Over the October half term, our Year 11 and 12 geography students travelled to Iceland to learn about the country’s diverse natural landscape and experience the spectacular beauty of the jagged coastlines, volcanoes and glaciers. Staying in the land of both fire and ice, the 5-day trip took students on a spectacular tour around Iceland,
Board game created to re-enact the Battle of the River Alma ‘History’ stems from the Latin for ‘enquiry’; for me, it is an enquiry not merely into the dusty and long-since overgrown past but, instead, one where we have the chance to explore who we were, who we might have been and who we are. Never has this seemed truer
