In 2020 Covid prevented us from running our usual whole school performance in term 3.
Instead, we rehearsed lines on Zoom during that term and made a film of the performance in term 4 which was, “The Curious Case of Romeo and Juliet”.
As usual, we had a home-grown performance, written with an eye to providing each of the year sixes with a main role.
One of them was interested in Shakespeare and wanted to do a Shakespearean play. This gave me an idea about having a play within a play happening and the result was a play that time-travelled between the sixteenth century and the twenty-first century.
Taking a lot of poetic license we had a play that started and finished in the sixteenth century with Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway attending Scarborough Fair.
Shakespeare then travelled to inner-city Melbourne (possibly Carlton?) in 2020, where he met up with the children of two families, the Capulets and the Montagues and his play evolved from this encounter.
The children all enjoyed the filming experience, and it was great to be not tied to our little stage for all the scenes when we took the maypole, the children playing with hoops and the Morris Dancers with sticks to the side of our Brushy Creek.
I’m interested to hear from this year’s year sixes, whether they’d like the same experience or whether they’d like to return to a full theatre production.
Making the film was certainly a very Covid friendly way to go.
