After a term of intensive rehearsals, on Tuesday evening the Grade 9/10 Drama class successfully presented their play Girl Who Cried Wolf, by Australian playwright Angela Betzein, to an audience of family and school community members.

Girl Who Cried Wolf is a gothic comedy morality tale that uses heightened realism, dark humour and technical theatre elements to explore many themes and issues. These include conformity, truth, isolation, friendship, fantasy, celebrity, grief, and the role that the media plays in perpetuating these issues. While these are some pretty serious themes, it is a very funny play. During our first class read through, there were many laugh-out-loud moments.

From the ‘catty’ Catriona with lines such as, ‘Did you mother microwave you at birth!’ and her tag-along boyfriend who cannot think of a better insult than: ‘you freaking…freak face’, to lying Laura Black, who is always trying to look more intelligent and competent than she really is, ‘I’ll have to report you for advertising the course of justice’, to the snappy tuckshop ‘lady’ who would rather ignore the grief of others for the sake of being ‘pleasant’. There are some truly awful (yet awfully entertaining) moments of dark humour.

Watching the class come to understand the characters and what they represented, and then experiment with ways to convey them to an audience, was fantastic. A lot of work went into really thinking about the characters – their motivations and influences as individuals, and also their importance to the play as a whole. And as we dove deeper into the play, more about the characters came to reveal themselves, such as Joe Black, who we came to see as someone still suffering from the mental effects of war and the treatment that he faced in the so-called ‘Pleasant Lakes’. Or Ada, the sister of the missing boy, who finally emerges to see the sun after five years of being frozen in time after the loss of her twin brother. Not all characters were so ‘deep’, however, some were just plain fun – like that brittle tuck-shop lady, the Idol MC, the disenchanted teacher, the foreboding narrators, the ‘good cop/bad cop’ detectives, the property magnate, and the P.E teacher, Mr Neat (please, someone take away that whistle!!)

In addition to the effective and engaging acting choices used by the performers, I was equally impressed by the work of our amazing tech crew who handled over 80 lighting cues, 50 projector slides and 32 sound cues with aplomb!! Not an easy feat!

Outside the performance space, a congratulation also needs to go to Ms Adrienne McMahon’s catering class who made such fabulous refreshments (including mocktails!), and to Mr Tony Guiterrez’s music students, Jamisen, Tiana and Julia, who provided fabulous performances in our pre-show ‘soiree’.

Many staff contributed to the success of the play, and what we achieved would not have been possible without them. Please have a look at the programme which is attached to this article for a complete thank you list. The programme also features the names of all of the students who were involved in the performance – both actors and tech crew.

As their Drama teacher, I could not be prouder of the work that the class put into this play, or of the quality of the show that they produced. AND I was most pleased that the class allowed me to use the song ‘Little Boxes’ as the music for bows! (Even if I did have to find a version more contemporary than the Malvina Reynolds 1962 original!)

A big well done to those involved! It was a lot of fun!

Mrs Genevieve Viney, Drama Teacher