The first play, ‘Consensual’, dealt with the issues that surrounded a newly qualified teacher of PSHE and her teenage student. Iqan Hussain found great depth in her hilarious portrayal of the troubled student, Georgia, and Amrita Desmet displayed high levels of tension and awkwardness as the teacher, Mary.

The second piece, ‘A day in the death of Joe Egg’, deals with a married couple’s struggles to raise a severely disabled child during the 1960’s. During this scene they re-enact the horrendous failings of the Health Service to provide them with support for their new born baby. Allegra Keys found a variety of madcap, characters in her exemplary multi-role playing style of acting, and Ayesha Khan revealed the sensitivities and frustrations of a new mother, trying to find answers to her difficult predicament.

The third performance included two extracts from the Olivier award winning, black comedy, ‘Dealer’s Choice’. In the first extract we are introduced to four cockney characters who discuss a forthcoming, illicit, poker game, and also the academically challenged character of Mugsy’s desires to set up a restaurant in a former toilet. In the second extract we see the poker game, and the tragi-comic nature of each character’s addictions to gambling. All four actor’s (Adelina Donaldson, Gabriella Gordon, Maya Gallen and Natasha Jackson) showed moments of great comedy and intensity in their work building to a most poignant ending.

The final performances came from Daisy Cloonan, Valentina Pozzi, Cosima Davenport and Matilde Monteforte in another Olivier award winning play, ‘Constellations’. It tells the tale of a classic ‘boy meets girl’ relationship, but is explored using the principle in Quantum Mechanics of the Multiverse. Each actor brought absolute clarity to their differing motivations for each of the sub scenes, as we see the characters of Roland and Mary, meet, fall out, come back together in a gym and then finally, a year later, discover that one of them has a terminal illness.

The audience left the space feeling moved by how much emotional intensity and humour such young actors can bring to such challenging texts, and with performances such as these I am sure that they will be aptly rewarded in their GCSE Drama results.