Page 152 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

11 March 2020

'I want to protect and prepare them': why

student shows attract starry directors

Three drama school productions highlight the appeal for established names in sharing
passion projects with actors flexing their performance muscles

‘Young people full of inquiry and courage’ … Gavi Singh Chera and Elizabeth Dulau in rehearsals at
London’s Rada for The Importance of Being Earnest. Photograph: Linda Carter

David Jays

Strap in, lads.” The Scottish playwright Stef Smith is giving the cast some new lines for her
contemporary version of Antigone. People sharpen their pencils, grab their rehearsal
scripts. For most of the actors it’s their first experience of working with a living writer.
These final-year students at Guildhall School are preparing the ambitious new text, one of
several big shows designed to flex their performance muscles, often with prominent
directors. For Antigone it’s Orla O’Loughlin, who after leading Edinburgh’s Traverse is now
director of drama at Guildhall. Bright-eyed, hoop earrings shimmying, she’s among the
directors whose student productions may not be reviewed or widely seen but will
nonetheless influence future British theatre. What are the artistic rewards? How is it
different from a professional show?

By their third and final year, students form a tight mesh. “They’ve lived and worked
together at close quarters,” O’Loughlin tells me. “They’ve grown up together” but “they’re
very vulnerable, they’re still young. I feel remarkably tiger mum about it! I want to protect
them as well as prepare them for the industry.”

“I like to work under the radar,” says Jade Lewis. At the London Academy of Music and
Dramatic Art (Lamda), she directs a play she knows inside out – as assistant director, she
followed Nine Night by Natasha Gordon from National Theatre to West End. “Now it’s less
about discovering what the play means, and more about what our version will mean,” she