Drama exams: always a drama, never a crisis

Published: 30 May 2012

On four evenings in May the current GCSE and AS-Level Drama groups presented their examination performances to an audience of rapt parents and friends and (hopefully) one very impressed examiner in the School Gym.

The two evenings tend to be very different in tone: they represent a culmination of the girls' work and achievements over their examination course. The GCSE girls present devised work - pieces which they have prepared themselves under the guidance of their teachers. Historically the GCSE evening has acquired a reputation for being two hours of unrelenting tragedy (last year we had a mother beaten over the head with a bottle by her wayward daughter, and a young soldier forced to shoot his own brother in the trenches in World War I): fascinating and engaging but never an easy watch. This year proved true to form: a batty old lady in a nursing home grieves for the daughter whose death she has never been able to reveal, an Amy Winehouse-inspired young singer dies a mysterious death in a hotel bedroom and even the Angel Gabriel cannot save her, a mute father stands by and watches his wife ailing as his family slowly falls apart. The one exception was the stuttering teenager who descends into chaos on the death of her beloved grandma but recovers with the support and love of her family - an unusually "up" story for the GCSE-ers. So we put it first on the bill - can't have the audience not in tears at the end of the evening!

The AS group presented 6 short monologue and duologues: a real challenge for any performer as they have to hold an audience's attention, show range and commitment in just two minutes! Pieces this year were drawn from texts as diverse as Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Dennis Kelly's DNA. The group performance was an adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The demand to present a whole play in less than an hour means that large chunks of text had to go, and Miller's epic social drama becomes a tight and claustrophobic love story - presented by this highly dance oriented group as a "music-less ballet", full of acrobatic lifts and symbolic gestures. The piece was intense and left many audience members weeping.

One day we'll do a comedy...