The Season of Range

This year’s Play Series rarely asked its performers to be just one thing. Across four productions staged over two weeks, students found themselves playing multiple characters, running lighting between scenes, or doing both in the same night.

Take The Hope and Heartache Diner, Year 12’s ensemble comedy set in a family diner four generations in the running, a refuge made up of misfits and stray regulars alike. Felix, the diner owner’s granddaughter, takes on a full open-to-close shift before leaving for university. Hunter Constantopoulos alone played six separate characters across the show, and was one of several cast members juggling more than one name tag.

Down the corridor, Pressure asked its own Year 12 cast for a different kind of range, not multiple characters, but the many pressures bearing down on one. Over the course of a single unravelling week before the formal, the ensemble worked through the perfectionist, the newbie and the imposter, each of them wondering, in their own way, whether things might still turn out alright, whether Kyle’s parents would ease up, whether Penny’s assessment would get remarked, whether Tera would make it to the formal at all.

For the Year 12 IB class, range extended past the stage altogether. Their production of Medea, Euripides’ 431 BC tragedy of a mother abandoned by her husband Jason for a royal marriage, and the devastation that follows, was lit, scored and costumed almost entirely by its own cast. Actors moved between the stage and the production desk across rehearsals and performances alike, learning the play from both sides of the curtain.

Closing the season, two entirely different Year 13 casts staged Twelfth Night, an 80s Musical a week apart, each finding their own version of Shakespeare’s shipwrecked twins and mistaken identities. Two songs, “I Want to Know What Love Is” and “Love Is in the Air,” ran as musical interludes throughout, voicing what the characters couldn’t quite say out loud. Between Orsino’s hopeless devotion, Olivia’s misdirected affection and Viola’s disguised heart, there was hardly a character on stage who wasn’t thinking one or the other at some point.

With recent Saint Kentigern Drama Alumni currently, or recently, appearing for Massive Theatre Company, Auckland Theatre Company, and on the Educators and Shortland Street, we look with anticipation to see where their evident talents and diligence will take our current  graduation Drama students.