Shakespeare Club
In November Shakespeare club performed Richard III at the Abbey Theatre in St Albans. It was a triumphant event!
After, the children wrote letters to the Shakespeare Schools Festival who organised the event. The letters below reflect what a fantastic experience it was for the children!
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival,
Thank you for giving us this wonderful opportunity to perform Shakespeare on stage. We have learnt how to use our bodies to create our characters and the set. Our favourite part of the play was when the first murderer (played by Rosie) stabbed Clarence (played by Andreas) because it was so dramatic. By having lots of rehearsals, it has made us more confident when using our voices. We got to learn Richard III and know how characters act in different parts of the play and also the language. We would love to come back next year.
Thank you
Anneka and Lauren
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival,
It has been an honour to work with you. We have developed many skills including: our confidence, using our voices, understanding the Shakespearean language and knowing who the character was. It has been a pleasure to go to the theatre and to be able to perform our performance. Our favourite part of the play was when the murderers kill Clarence. We found it sad and amusing at the same time. Not only did we play the play, we learnt all about it to know that Richard was an evil man who did not want to be messed with.
Thank you
From Vita and Luca
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival,
We loved the performance at the Abbey Theatre this year. It was wonderful having the opportunity to act in front of hundreds of people. It has developed our knowledge of the Shakespearean language and how to use our bodies to create characters and sets. We just thought it was magnificent.
Kind regards
Ollie and Tom
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival,
Thank you for letting us take part in this thrilling festival. I have learnt so much over the course of the last 3 weeks. My confidence has grown massively and performing in front of hundreds of people made me feel important. When we had been rehearsing on Monday nights, we learnt tricky words in the script we didn’t understand so when we said them we could speak as if we knew them. My favourite part of the play was the ghost scene at the end. I was involved in that scene as a tent! Knowing your character was hard. I was King Edward IV, messenger 5, tent, tent and the leader of the battle scene at the end.
Yours sincerely
Luke B
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival,
We were thrilled to have the opportunity to perform in the Shakespeare Schools Festival again. We have learnt how to use our bodies to create our characters and to add to the set. During rehearsals, we had to choose an animal to represent our character. Mine was a mayfly; my friend’s was a fat lazy cat.
We understood the language really well so that we and our voices could react. Our favourite scene was when Clarence got murdered!
From
Nathan and Andreas
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival,
We would really like to thank you for this truly thrilling opportunity to perform this amazing Shakespearean play. It has helped our confidence to grow and we have learnt many acting skills from it such as using our bodies and facial expressions to create characters and stage sets. We now feel we understand the language of Shakespeare and we sometimes even use it out of Shakespeare club. Also we have managed to give ideas to help improve our performance. Richard III was a very difficult play but we think that we performed very well and we remembered all of our lines and it was a wonderful experience. To build our characters, we chose animals that were similar to our characters to help us create a personality. Our favourite scenes were Clarence’s murder, the battle and the ghost scene.
Yours sincerely
Keira and Rosie from Grove Junior School
(Catesby and Dorset)
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival,
Thank you very much for the wonderful opportunity to perform Shakespeare on stage. We have produced an amazing version of Richard III. Performing Shakespeare on stage has pushed my confidence and now I feel that I can do anything. Learning language from Shakespeare’s time has helped me in understanding all plays written by him. It will also help me all the way through secondary school and my future.
Thank you very much
From Freya James
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival
This wonderful opportunity has given us lots of confidence and an amazing chance to perform on stage. This helped us to know how to project our voices and we can now understand the language. We found out that using your body to create the character and set gave it an atmosphere.
Thank you
Mia and Corran
Dear Shakespeare Schools Festival
Thank you for letting us perform on the stage and experience this wonderful Shakespeare Schools Festival. It made me more confident going on stage and being a character from Shakespeare made me feel happy! This experience made me understand the language of Shakespeare and I would now love to see a Shakespeare performance. I managed to use my body to create the character and the set for Richard III.
From Grace Murray