Drama

Drama in the Sixth Form at MCS offers something for everyone,  with a huge range of opportunities available for pupils of all tastes and abilities.

The school enjoys exciting partnerships with the Oxford Playhouse and the Pegasus Theatre, giving access to impressive performance spaces and professional direction. During the course of the year MCS stages as many as twelve productions, some specific to certain year groups, others open to all; the underlying principle is that every pupil should be able to take part in two shows during the year. Usual highlights of the annual programme include a Greek play, a large-scale musical, various studio productions including an Edinburgh Fringe transfer, a mainstage production at Oxford Playhouse and an outdoor Shakespeare on the banks of the Cherwell. The aim is to expose pupils to a mixture of classic texts and new writing, and older pupils are encouraged to gain experience of directing, producing and even writing their own pieces of theatre. With an equal emphasis on enjoyment and quality, there is definitely something to suit all tastes and abilities.

At the cutting edge

We pride ourselves on continuing to develop our Drama programme with ever more challenging projects, whether high-quality productions of familiar titles or the premieres of new works. Highlights of this year’s programme included a joyous Anything Goes, an intense and immersive Julius Caesar and a very moving All My Sons. We staged a production of Chekhov’s farce The Bear in the beautiful surroundings of Wotton House. Our Lower School pupils delighted audiences with The 39 Steps and Endurance, a new play about Shackleton’s polar expedition.

We produce an unusually large amount of new writing, as much as half of the year’s programme in some years. The culmination of this year’s programme was a hugely ambitious production of a new musical adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, by Alex Thomas (Head of Drama) and John Mann (Head of Instrumental music). This was premiered to great acclaim in June 2023 at Oxford Playhouse, earning a 5* review in the Oxford Times and selling more tickets than any previous MCS production.

‘…exhilarating, fun, polished and impeccably produced. Unmissable.’

We frequently perform new adaptations of classic texts or stories with our Lower School, from Endurance (about Shackleton’s expedition) to Moby Dick and Gulliver’s Travels. In addition to The Hobbit, major new musical adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, and Peter Pan have graced the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, and our Edinburgh Fringe offering is often a piece of new writing by up-and-coming playwrights. Last year’s Edinburgh Fringe offering, Troy Story, was a new work commissioned from award-winning playwright, Oliver Clark.

This summer, for a change, we headed to the South-West, performing a new adaptation of Sabatine’s swashbuckling French Revolution romance, Scaramouche! in Weymouth castle, Wells Bishop’s Palace, Bath Assembly Rooms and Waterperry Gardens.

Two pieces of original writing by Sixth-Form pupils have been performed in recent Arts Festivals (Nightjars and Ferrari Steel), while there is usually at least one pupil-directed production in the year’s programme, not to mention the hotly-contested House Drama competition, which sees each house perform a fifteen-minute piece of theatre to a packed Big School.

Our 2018 centenary commemorations for WWI were centred around a large-scale collaborative project between pupils and staff which resulted in an original stage production, Reflections. You can hear more about this extraordinary process here:

A professional touch

Through constant performance opportunities, Drama clubs, and our Theatre Academy, MCS aims to develop pupils’ stagecraft as well as their general confidence and collaborative skills. The MCS Theatre Academy was introduced in 2011 in tandem with two one-year residencies offered by the School and Oxford Playhouse to professional directors and producers. The weekly Academy sessions are held at MCS (for Lower School boys) and Pegasus Theatre (Middle School) and focus on developing core skills in voice, movement and stagecraft while building towards large-scale productions. Visiting practitioners deliver exciting workshops in everything from stage combat to puppetry and mask-work. Academy places are also available to a number of external pupils.

Our resident professionals have gone on to have remarkably successful journeys in the theatre industry. Alice Malin is Associate Director for ATC (Actors Touring Company), Polly Tisdall directed the award-winning The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Family and Francesca Murray-Fuentes a successful freelance writer and director. Natasha Prince is producing at The Barn in Cirencester, Zak Khan is producer at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester, Ashleigh Wheeler is Executive Director at The Yard theatre, Sam Julyan’s company is behind the recent international tour of Room and No Villain and Ciara McCafferty is currently Producer at the Tinderbox Theatre. Eleanor Warr is now working at the RSC as part of their education team.

The Academy has also produced exceptional actors, several of whom stand poised to enter the profession:

“It was whilst working with the Theatre Academy that I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in the Performing Arts; the opportunity to work with professional directors in professional venues has gone a long way to preparing me for acting at university and beyond” – Hugh Tappin, OW 2016

Drama scholarships are available for boys and girls entering the Sixth Form, please click here for details.

Lockdown

2020-21 saw unprecedented challenges for everyone in the drama world. We enjoyed exploring new ways of making theatre, starting with an 8-part radio series, When We Meet Again, which was researched, devised and written by pupils. Set between 1939 and 2020, it explored the parallels between the opening months of WWII and the first lockdown. You can still listen to it here.

Once we were back in school we turned to film as the best way of sharing our theatre-making with the wider school community. Our first production was a socially-distanced version of Romeo and Juliet, set on a giant chess board. We brought in professional film-makers to work with our pupils on two very ambitious projects, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and Les Misérables. Our younger pupils produced a film and audio adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, and we collaborated with the Classics Department on dramatic recordings of a number of Greek tragedies.

Technically speaking…

All shows involve pupils on the technical and backstage crews, and in 2018 MCS set up a Technical Theatre Academy based at Pegasus Theatre to develop this side of the school’s provision. Our older pupils take full ownership over lighting and sound designs for our major productions, and gain invaluable experience from working alongside industry professionals at Oxford Playhouse and elsewhere. Younger pupils are mentored by Sixth-Formers, taking increasingly large roles in technical and backstage capacities.

All the world’s a stage

MCS is always keen to give pupils the chance to take their passion for drama in new directions, and we collaborate with various other departments on a number of projects through the year. 2018 saw a group of actors perform excerpts from Twelfth Night at an alumnus dinner in London’s Middle Temple Hall, the very space in which the play was originally premiered! The Drama staff are always looking for new challenges too, for example taking a group of Sixth Formers on tour through the Tuscan hills as ‘strolling players’, performing The Knight’s Tale to Italian audiences for a week in July. Recent leavers made up the cast for a semi-professional production of a new musical, Swing Heil!, set in Nazi Germany’s jazz underworld. All the world’s a stage, so come and join the fun!

A taste of recent productions