Regents’ pantomime students bring smiles to the faces of the Fountain of Life and Mercy Centre children

GCSE drama students help raise money for Amnesty International

Regents’ pantomime students bring smiles to the faces of the Fountain of Life and Mercy Centre children

The Regents’ Aladdin actors and the Mercy Center children.

The Regents’ actors enjoy making friends with
the audience after the performance.

Michael Thomas Regents School Head of Drama
A group of 18 students from the Years 7 and 8 Round Square Community Service Pantomime group recently brought laughter and joy to the children of Fountain and Life and Mercy Centre with their production of Aladdin. The first performance was to the Fountain of Life students in the school’s Globe Theatre.

Aladdin, played by Christianne Petras, enters the magic cave.

The second show saw the students pack themselves into a mini-van, together with their costumes, props and make-up, to perform for the young people of the Mercy Centre in Pattaya.
The Regent’s actors met the challenge of performing in unfamiliar surroundings with amazing confidence. The children in the audience were delighted at the antics of the mischievous Tinkerbell, played by Cassie Dowling, to steal the spotlight from the narrators played by Malin Eh and Lisa Rudram.

Valerie de Saegher as the Sultan and Paige Bryant as the Nanny.

Sabrina Brooker, as the evil Abanazar, certainly encouraged a lot of ‘pantomime boo’s’ and shouts of ‘he’s-behind-you’ as he vainly tried to steal the magic lamp from Aladdin. Valerie de Saegher as the vain Sultan, Lara Tshering as Dame Widow Twankey and Paige Bryant as the romantic Nanny all gave appropriately larger-than-life performances which delighted the young audience.
After both shows, the students played games with the children with refreshments provided by the Regent’s Student Guild. This is the second successful year of the Pantomime Project: hopefully, it will continue to be an annual event in the school calendar.

 

GCSE drama students help raise money for Amnesty International

Katrina Lillienthal
Year 11 GCSE Drama
A group of Year 11 GCSE Drama students recently gave a performance called The Disappeared which raised money for the school’s Amnesty group.

GCSE Year 11 drama group performs in the disappeared.

As part of this, Year 11 GCSE Drama examination the students Melissa Cru, David Gibbon and Katrina Lillienthal, devised the play based on newspaper accounts of survivors of the Dirty War of the 1970’s in Argentina. The drama was structured as a series of monologues and short scenes which blended naturalistic and abstract theatre techniques. The story focused on the main character Maria Alamar and her betrayal, under torture, of her childhood friend Elizabeth to the military authorities. She was also forced to betray her husband. As a way of cleansing herself of guilt she agrees to adopt Elizabeth’s child. Years later, following a chance discovery, that child discovers her true identity and disowns her adoptive parents.

David Gibbon, Katrina Lillienthal and Melissa Cru.

The play ended with a reminder from the actors that such deep wounds are difficult to heal and that more recent conflicts involve similar abuse of basic human rights. The performance of the play coincided with reports of a court case based on an identical situation currently being heard in the Argentinean capital, Buenos Aires.
The reaction from the audience to the performance was very positive and many said it really made them reflect on the issues focused on in the play. The money raised at the performance will be used by students in the Regents’ Round Square Amnesty group to help disadvantaged young people in Pattaya.