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“notwithstanding
the inescapable,
infectious feel-good
factorof theboys
communicating
somuchsoul”
MLS’s latest creation threw us head first
into Austerity Britain and the circumstances
and personalities involved in the imminent
closure of an under-funded theatre. Thus
the snappy dialogue, interspersed with
alternating vocal board-rattlers and tear-
jerkers, could array well-organised modern
realities (convenience, profit, celebrity and
other signs of the times) against plucky
but culturally fragile skirmishers (talent,
ambition, loyalty, and community) who
refuse to give up without a final fight.
But there was a fuller significance of
this production, notwithstanding the
inescapable, infectious feel-good factor of
the boys communicating so much soul.
Because ‘when the beating of your heart’
echoes rather more the drilling opposite
Macmillan in preparation for OX2’s own
latest ‘luxury apartments’ as much as any
revolutionary drums, we remember that on
this side of the road ‘there is a life about
to start’, and that learning to realise ‘how
wonderful life is’ (despite
Gus Howland’s
soaring alto and exquisite length of phrasing
in
Your Song
certainly providing some
hints) is never as simple as just following
someone else’s architectural instructions. As
important, and much more exciting, is what
can be achieved when we ‘start to rehearse
when we still do not have a script’: it really
does ‘happen a lot around here’ where life’s
rehearsal is lived simultaneously with the
real thing.
In other words... it takes considerable
self-assertiveness for any boy new to the
stage or the school itself, yet alone in
only the 2nd or 3rd Years, to accept the
S u m m e r F i e l d s
2 0 1 5 – 2 0 1 6