The Year 10 girls expertly captured the humour and pathos of Willy Russell’s seminal 1980’s musical, Blood Brothers. The story tells the tale of Mrs Johnston and her decision to sell one of her twin sons to a middle class woman, Mrs Lyons. As the play progresses we see the boys grow up in very different ways, until the one twin, Mickey, enters into a life of crime, and his twin Eddie becomes an established councillor. After Eddie indulges in an unfortunate romance with Mickey’s wife, Linda, Mickey tracks him down and tragedy ensues.

Every cast member conveyed refined, naturalistic performances, which displayed great comedic performances and heart-melting sorrow at the play’s climax as the entire cast sang unaccompanied, ‘Tell me it’s not true’.

After a brief interval, the Year 12 actors, Anna Nigmatulina and Grace Patterson performed a unique piece of devised theatre using Verbatim Theatre, taking the work of Aleky Blythe as their stimulus. Over the past two months, the girls had been interviewing a whole array of people from the local community and asked the question, ‘What are your greatest fears?’ The results have been fascinating. From this the girls collated the recordings and edited them down to a 15 minute piece of theatre, using the exact words, vocal tics and mannerisms of the interviewees. With each actor playing over 10 parts, as well as physically enacting each phobia, the two girls also used live singing, video projection and technical wizardry to bring this piece to life. It was a testament to the girl’s skill and huge ability that an audience member was heard to say afterwards, ‘…this was worthy of a professional production, I would happily have paid to see it in town.’