So starts Alison Carr’s play for the National Theatre Connections festival – St Laurence’s choice for their performance this year. Only 300 youth groups and schools can take part in this annual celebration of theatre so we were delighted to be accepted and the 25 string cast and crew have been working hard since September on the production. The hard work finally paid off with a performance of the show in our own Trinity Hall. This performance was watched by National Theatre director Freyja Winterson. Freyja was very complimentary about the show and she particulary like the use of the ensemble to tell this story of the day two worlds collided and ripped a tear into the sky.
One of our Year 8 students, who performed in the piece, wrote about the subsequent trip to the Salisbury Playhouse where students got to spend the day in workshops and rehearsals before performing on the main house stage.
‘Salisbury Playhouse was an awesome experience. We got to know some people who worked there, and they were very kind and helpful. We had our own room to practice Tuesday (the play) and Laura (one of the people from the playhouse) helped us improve our volume and gestures and drama skills in general with a lot of fun games. After that it was lunch, but we can skip that part! After lunch it was tech rehearsal which is basically the director taking lines from the script where the music starts or there’s a sound effect. We did that for 2 hours straight it was very tiring. When we finished the tech run there was 30 minutes left before we could have domino’s pizza so to our disappointment, we had to run the play again but a speed run where we said our lines extremely fast. It was incredibly funny. Surprisingly we managed to finish a 50-minute play in 25 minutes and finally it was our pizza break! Then it was the moment the whole cast had been waiting and rehearsing for, for over 7 months…..the play started. It finished and it went really, really well! The audience clapped and cheered at the end, during the play we got laughs and gasps and it was good to know the audience was engaging’
It happened on a Thursday at Salisbury Playhouse, and it was really really cool!’
St Laurence School Showcase 
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