On Stage

A particularly pleasing performance by our drama guys at the Lee Suan Yew Speaker of the Year Award was the highlight of the day. That and the speakers themselves who acquitted themselves admirably. I've reached the age when I spend more time worrying about how kids are going to perform on stage than they do themselves. The concern that someone is going to freeze and stand there doing an impersonation of a particularly breathless goldfish is strong enough to take all the fun out of the proceedings. I'm only relaxed when it's over.

With the drama it's a bit different. I know they're going to be good. The question is, rather, how will the material work with the audience. Today we did The Birthday of the Infanta, the piece we did twice in the ACSIS Assortments evening. This time the two casts worked together, one group providing the voices whilst the other 'acted it out', as it were, on stage. This was Ferd's idea for getting around the miking constraints, but it worked in its own right as a clever and oddly resonant technique. The cast made it work brilliantly, which was a good and necessary thing since from the beginning we'd been concerned about audience reaction. The play is not typical fare for our school, and coming on in front of an audience who'd been sitting quietly already for over an hour and a half the worry was we'd get a lot of noise and other botheration. But we knew for sure the cast's discipline would get them through anything.

In the event the audience were extremely attentive, or at least that's how I interpreted the silence from the Year 1s behind me. We had a few flutters of inappropriate laughter, particularly in the early part of the big death scene, but nothing that got out of control. It was a great test for our guys, going for broke with something that might not have popular appeal, and they aced it.