Arabian Nights come to Crowthorne

This year Wellingtonians and many prep school and girls alike are privileged to see everyone's favourite Disney story. The 4th form drama group, Charles Bailey (Bd), Douglas Chung (Bn), Dominic Ebbetts (Bn), James Heaford (T), Farouk Edu (Bl) and Sasha Ponomarenko (Hl) are taking Aladdin on tour to six different prep schools over these two weeks, and having been lucky enough to see a sneak preview, I am sure that boys and girls from 7-18 will be amazed.

The tour schedule started with performances at Ludgrove, Papplewick and Woodcote House. This week saw performances at Eagle House and Lambrook Haileybury leading up to a grand finale Eve of Speech Day performance in the Queen's Court Amphitheature

The challenge for the group has been to go to each school, asses the performance area, and perform. What makes the challenge even tougher however is the fact that it is an open stage and actors that are not acting can be seen by the audience: this puts the focus on the actors that are acting to draw the audience in, and having seen this, I assure you with the quality standard of acting, audience interaction, a smoke machine and some dazzling lighting effects, as well as the deep voice of an old cave, people will find it very hard to lose focus.

Although the play sticks too closely to the cartoon, in my opinion, overall it is an impressive performance by all concerned.

Ed Hidden (L)