Ballakermeen Year 12 BTec Performing Arts students celebrated the end of another very successful year’s study with a week long sell out run of the acclaimed play DNA by Dennis Kelly, at the school’s Studio Theatre.
Performing to packed houses each night the students excelled in the roles of this uncompromising and challenging play and left the audiences utterly enthralled.
DNA tells the story of a diverse group of teenagers who pick on and bully the weakest member of their gang. One night their bullying goes too far and the group are left thinking they have accidentally killed their victim. Trying to cover up what they have done, the students invent an elaborate story which throws the blame for the boy’s disappearance on to an innocent man. When their victim miraculously appears two weeks later, battered and bruised in a forest, his arrival threatens the validity of the group’s story. The gang are then left with a dilemma: admit to their wrongdoing or get rid of the incriminating evidence and kill him.
The author of the piece Dennis Kelly (Matilda the Musical, After The End, Orphans) is one of Britain’s leading playwrights and a man respected for his intellectual ideas and polemic as much as for his skill in writing. This being the case, DNA is a play full of big theories and searching questions about life, the universe and the origins of human nature.
The cast who had worked hard on the production for five months were all outstanding and delivered a ensemble performance of great power and emotional range. Each of them deserves a mention: Laura Barlow, Amaara Sharp, Jake Hume, Louise Wright, Louisa Bowker, Andrew Deighton, Emily Bray, Conor Strickland, Michael Cowin, Victoria Wylde and Sam Martin. All of these young actors gave everything they had to give and the result was an urgent and entirely visceral display of excellent acting.
Stephen Craige, their Performing Arts teacher, said: ‘I am thrilled for these students and their success. Their commitment to the project, their work ethic and their desire to be the best performers they can be has been astonishing. They work so well as a group and understood early in rehearsals the great need to create a positive working relationship, which they harnessed fully. They are a wonderful team of young people and it has been a joy to teach them all. Ballakermeen is very proud of them and their achievements in this remarkable production.’
