The Stage

The Academy Drama School - 2004 Graduates Showcase

Published Thursday 10 June 2004 at 15:15 by Mark Shenton

Attending east London’s Academy Drama School showcase was a bit like being back at school for an end of term show and prize-giving. First, school patron Edward De Souza gave an embracing kind of speech about the students being on the cusp of their careers. Meanwhile, school principal Tim Reynolds was policing the auditorium during the show for photograph takers and admonishing them as they did so. But after the showcase ended, it was also made clear that friends and family should save their congratulations for later, the more serious networking opportunities were only reserved for those in the business.

In other words, this was an occasion of conflicting tenderness and tension and not the most professional environment from which to send these students into the world. But then neither, to be frank, was the show that they were a part of. Things did not begin promisingly with a medley from Charles Strouse and Lee Adams’s musical Bye Bye Birdie, that made the students look like a ragged bunch of American high school kids, not the professionally trained actors that their presence here suggested they had now become.

After this bleak introduction, students were stacked into trios to perform a rush of 12 scenes from contemporary and classic plays. These snapshot scenes didn’t do too well, either, to demonstrate range or ability. Instead they boxed students into portraying one type of character only, with the added tension inherent in the fact that they not only had to fight for scene time with their fellow students but also that the scenes themselves were frequently clumsily staged.

Only Simon Money and Sarah Gabaili - afforded the sole opportunity to do a duo instead of a trio scene - were able to rise above the tone of the rest of the rushed showcase and make strong individual impressions in a scene from Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses - wrongly called Dangerous Liaisons in the programme.

It was a relief that the curtain calls finally offered the students a chance to shine in their own rights, as each took to the stage for a minute’s monologue of their own choosing and preparation. Suddenly, some real talent stepped forward as they finally had the opportunity for the quirky and the personal. From these, I highlighted notable contributions from Leah Grayson, Deborah Chapman, Zack Middleton and Susan Scantelbury.

While the Academy School’s graduate brochure is also poorly put together - the headshots should at least be alphabeticised at the front of the book and the formatting of the CVs standardised - a far better job is done on a specially created website (www.academygraduates2004.co.uk) that marries the pictures to the CVs that are indeed offered in a consistent format.

Mark Shenton

EXPERT CHOICE

KERRY MICHAEL (Deputy artistic director, Theatre Royal, Stratford East) chose Simon Money and Sarah Gabaili

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