Thursday - The Performing Arts

Date: Thursday 25 March 2010

A daily feature of Canterbury Cathedral life is the service of Choral Evensong, sung usually by a combination of Lay Clerks and Cathedral Choristers, led by the Precentor. Yesterday, in the week preceding Holy Week, and in the absence of the Choristers, on holiday, and preparing to return for 'boarder choir', St Edmund's Chapel Choir accepted an invitation to sing evensong, with the Chaplain acting in the Precentor's role, and Spencer Payne on the organ.

This proved to be an honour, and a challenge, to which all rose with confidence and success. A regular congregation, swollen by the arrival of parties from the Netherlands and Estonia, plus many members of the St Edmund's family, enjoyed the combination of Elgar's 'Ave verum corpus', followed by Smith's setting of the Responses, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis - Stanford in B flat, and the Grayston Ives' anthem, 'Listen, sweet dove'. It would be lovely if the choir had the chance to sing in other regional cathedral settings, and before such a large weekday congregation.

The evening saw the final stage of Theatre Studies public performances, as the eleven members of the U6 class could not have done any better in the eyes of the external moderator who was effusive in her praise of two very different pieces, both created by the pupils themselves, without any input from the teaching members of the department.

Carl Fryer, Margot Chatenay, Charlotte Lench, Alice Hickey, and Katie McNie were perfect exponents of the genre of 'physical theatre', as they took us in a mad whirl of scenarios from the moment when Carl emerged from the primordial soup and evolved into homo sapiens through to the present day with the current generation, through their excesses, returning to the swamp!

In the second playlet, Oli Baker, condemned as 'gay' and proving his virility by stalking and rape, Sam Catford, vilified as big and tall, collapsing into the grip of bulimia, Arabella Pemberton, surrounded by dirt and germs, finding escape only by obsessive washing, Max Rushton, escaping from the routine of weekday drudgery by Saturday night pill-popping, and Rayne Maney, the archetypal alcoholic, finding her only friend in the comfort of the bottle, illustrated to perfection the horrors of 'Addiction'. I was stunned by the power of the piece.

Another fantastic day for the pupils of St Edmund's. they have all earned an Easter break!