Welcome to the Drama Department

Drama is one of the oldest subjects known to academia and is still an exciting and stimulating subject to study. It stretches a child's intellectual ability, challenges their way of seeing the world and increases their capacity to communicate ideas.

In the lower school, Drama is taught as part of the English curriculum. Pupils work through the core skills in their lessons and can pursue Drama further at lunchtime clubs that provide them with extra opportunities to perform. Gifted and enthusiastic lower sixth drama students run these clubs. There is also a 'Drama for Life', after school club for years 7-9 pupils, led by a professional teacher.

We are intending to stage a whole school production in the summer term alongside the music department, which will give a wide range of pupils an opportunity to experience the excitement and challenge of theatre first hand and we hope will bring pleasure and entertainment to the audience of parents and friends that come.

As a Drama department we hope to offer courses that are challenging and dynamic, that will spark creative ways of thinking, give pupils increased self-confidence, and, above all, instil in them a love of theatre, that they will carry with them throughout their life.

GCSE

We now have an exciting new GCSE course on offer, which allows those who are talented at Drama to pursue their gifting. The syllabus requires the pupils to perform and analyse their own and other performances. They learn how a piece of theatre is constructed and this helps increase their appreciation of productions they see.

DRAMA A/S AND A2

This course gives pupils a good working knowledge of theatre practitioners, from Aristotle through Stanislavski, to Brecht. It requires them to study plays in depth and will also enable them to polish and hone their own performance skills. In the first year they study two texts from a dramatic point of view; take part in a group production and then sit an examination in which they write about their performance piece and analyse a production they have seen. Check out "forthcoming events" for the dates of their latest production: a modern adaptation of the ancient Faustus myth that was originally brought to dramatic life by Marlowe.

Drama in the upper sixth is taught in conjunction with the Watford Grammar School for Boy's, which adds a degree of variety to the course! In the upper sixth they are required to devise their own piece of theatre in small groups and then compile an extensive piece of coursework analysing the process. They then take a text and produce an abridged adaptation for their practical unit, and finally sit an examination where they must write about their directorial ideas for the script of a Greek play and study the production history of a play that we will see and analyse together as a group.

Theatre Trips

As an active part of the curriculum we consider it a priority for our students to be experiencing as much live theatre as possible. With easy access to the West End, they have the opportunity to see world-class drama and more experimental work. So far this year we have taken groups of pupils to see Mark Rylance's outstanding version of The Tempest, at the Globe; Watford Palace's touring performance of one of Brecht's earlier plays, Fear and Misery in the Third Reich; an innovative production of Trojan Women by the Euripides, staged by the Actors of Dionysus; a large group went to Coram Boy at the National Theatre and the GCSE group will shortly be seeing the highly acclaimed production of Journey's End, by Sherriff at the Ambassador's theatre. We also have tickets for Shaffer's play at the National, Royal Hunt of the Sun and are taking the Year 7s to see Kensuke's Kingdom, a stage version of a book many of them have read and loved. There are many more trips planned and we endeavour to organise things so that all year groups at some point get the opportunity to participate.