During the whole preparation, what was the biggest challenge for the performers?

This biggest challenge in this production was the huge amount of collaboration required from everyone backstage. There were a lot of set changes and a lot of actors playing multiple roles requiring costume and makeup changes and space backstage was very limited. This took a lot of practice to get right. I was really impressed with how well everyone worked together to achieve these complicated and impressive transformations of the stage space.

Do you think the final effect met your expectation?

During the show I was in the tech booth controlling the lights and sound, so I sadly was not able to watch the play live. But when I watched the performance video I was so amazed and proud of the performances every single student gave. They really gave such convincing performances and even improvised improvements to a lot to the scenes using their acting skills. The Big Brother videos that were all created by our film editor, Lauren, were also so dramatic and set such a great atmosphere. I think the students did a great job of bringing the world of 1984 to life, and it was actually much more realistic and visually impressive than I could have imagined. One of my favourite parts of Drama Team is seeing how the students bring their own creativity to the final shows. This year was a really special example of that.

There are many elements of comedy in the performance of drama‘Heathers’, like lovely decorations for ghosts,amusing gestures of policewomen and so on.How did you come up with those creative ideas?

Despite its dark themes, Heathers has so much great comedic moments and potential. Whenever I’m directing comedy, I always try to do this in collaboration with our amazing student actors, who know the sense of humour of our audience much better than I do! This process involves me explaining to the actors where the comedic potential of a scene is, then asking them to be creative and experiment with the comedy. For example, in the policewomen scene, the comedy comes from the undeserved arrogance of the dumb senior cop contrasting with the naive adoration of the junior cop for her boss. The students then brought lots of incredible and hilarious gestures and ideas to the scene. In terms of set and props, I love visual comedy, and sometimes I think it’s as simple as making something so obvious it is silly, and funny, such as the “ghost” signs the dead characters wear for the rest of the play.

The emotional tension required for the main characters is really strong and various.For instance, there are several arguments and screaming in the play, which are not quite easy.What attempts did you make to guide the students actresses to complete them in such high quality?

Building tension is a really challenging acting skill. It requires very authentic, realistic acting, and excellent timing. When working with tense scenes the first part of the process is to help the actors really connect with the characters, their background, motivations, and inner thoughts that are not actually said within the script. We then carefully block out the movements, facial expressions, moments of touch, pauses etc. and experiment with what builds the most tension. It’s a very vulnerable, and challenging process, which usually starts out with a lot of discomfort. But it also involves a lot of laughter at the ways basic mistakes will completely destroy the tension of the scene. I was very lucky to work with Cici and Helen, who played Veronica and J.D. as they are very experienced, dedicated actors, who are always willing to put in the time and effort needed until a tense scene works. I think they gave incredible, convincing performances, and I’m really proud of their hard work!