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The Guilders Company's festival performance Over the past two nights, Ellowes Hall School's Year 7 and 8 drama group the Guilders Company have been performing Totally Over You by Mark Ravenhall, as part of the National Youth Drama Festival sponsored by Shell Conections (click here for details). Both the Mayor and Councillor David Caunt were in attendance on the opening night - and Yampy had tickets too. Totally Over You is billed as 'a wry look at the folly of celebrity'. Kitty (Emily Medlyn) has dumped her boyfriend Jake (Daniel Ormerod) and incited her three friends to do the same. They want to be celebrities, and the boys don't fit in with their plans. The dejected lads turn to enigmatic loner Victor (Matthew Bird) for advice, who engineers a situation where the boys perform a play about a successful boy band, which is so convincing that their ex-girlfriends believe it is real and begin to wonder whether they should have stuck with their partners, in order to at least bask in the reflected glory of someone else's fame. Although this is the first production by The Guilders, the students had clearly worked very hard on their lines and the atmosphere was one of a 'proper' stage presentation rather than a traditional school play. The actors were initially a little nervous and hurried , but this was understandable given that they were being watched by professional external assessors, who must have been impressed by their efforts with what was a rather light-weight script. As the scenes unfolded confidence grew, and there was generally excellent delivery of passages that on occasions demanded incredible feats of memory - especially when Victor walked in circles reeling off more or less every possible way in which celebrity can be portrayed in the modern world! The play makes a number of well observed comments about the pervasiveness of celebrity culture, where the point is not so much to be a singer, model, or footballer, but to attain fame of any kind and via whatever media. However, Kitty dumps Jake with such gusto in the opening exchange that one can hardly feel any sympathy for her as the play progresses. It is difficult to understand therefore why the author chose to end the play with the same couple reflecting on a relationship that apparently still has some mileage, when the final scene should really have belonged to the far more interesting budding romance of Victor and Letitia (Charlotte Beeston), an aspiring actress pursuing her dream for more commendable reasons than Kitty's crew. I was also unimpressed with Mark Ravenhall's use of bad language in the play, not because I object per se (although it would have felt more comfortable if the children were just a couple of years older), but because the swear words chosen were clumsily placed for shock value, in a script that in other respects made little attempt to capture the rhythm and metre of teenagers' normal conversation. Generous with the loud and vitriolic 'shit', 'piss', 'bastard' and 'bitch', there was a quaint reversion to 'freaking' for the f-word, which destroys any principled "it's how kids talk today so we have to honestly represent it" stance. Personally, I would have been far less offended if, instead of the barrage of 'lesser' oaths, the occasional f-word had cropped up - I'm sure even the Mayor has let the odd one slip out! The cast, of course, can only work with the script they have been given, and drama teacher Ginni Robbins must have been delighted by the Guilders first performance - well done to everyone involved. Following the play the audience were treated to three enthusiastically delivered dance pieces by Ellowes students. All were enjoyable, but I found the Year 7 contribution "Devastating Impact" particularly thought-provoking, in view of the war against Iraq that had just began. The performance emphasised young life, with lots of extension. It featured a repeated and distinctive 'fist against chest' movement that summoned up images of a heart beat and ended, ominously, with all dancers lying motionless on the floor. Whether an intentional reference to current events or not, it was powerful and moving. Congratulations to the artists and their co-ordinator Rebecca Giles.

Next: New Upper Gornal advice surgery..