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Oxford Playhouse:
5th Years – March
After a busy day of lessons
and BOSFAM golf, the Fifth
Years spent their evening at
the theatre.
The production, Alan Bennett’s
Single Spies
,
was in fact a double-bill of two short plays.
The first,
An Englishman Abroad
, tells the
story of when the actress Coral Browne
met defector Guy Burgess (he of the
Cambridge Five) in Moscow in the fifties.
The rather sad condition of the spy in his
exile, his loneliness, as well as the strange
cynical kindness of Miss Browne, was
portrayed by a cast which included Belinda
Lang and Nicholas Farrell, in suitably louche
and vodka-soaked form.
The second play was entitled
A Question
of Attribution
. Arguably the stronger of the
two pieces, this depicted the interesting
relationship which may have existed
between the Queen and Anthony Blunt,
another Cambridge spy and a distinguished
art historian who became Director of the
Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the
Queen’s Pictures. This was a veritable
acting masterclass, with a superb,
controlled performance by David Robb as
Blunt, and another wickedly amusing turn
by Belinda Lang as the monarch. The boys
will also have learnt a great deal about art
history and criticism from the experience!
This was grown-up, nuanced and witty
comedy, with writing that was pretty
cerebral in nature. It was an impressive
production with a distinguished cast of
actors, and was a worthwhile experience
for many of our boys, all of whom behaved
impeccably throughout the evening.
TMLE
The Somme
Parents & Sons – April
Towards the end of the Easter
holidays 31 intrepid boys,
parents and staff set off to the
Somme for the weekend.
They walked the battlefields discovering the
artefacts of war that still litter the ground
and were treated to a demonstration of
how the explosives are still live! They visited
cemeteries and paid their respects to many
Old Summerfieldians who had bravely
given their lives.The highlight, perhaps, was
hearing the story of Billy Congreve who won
a posthumous Victoria Cross for his acts of
bravery on the Somme.The poignancy of the
trip was neatly summarised by one of the
parents (William, father of
Albert Sitwell
)
who later wrote,“If the immaculate graves, in
perfectly manicured cemeteries that lay on the
edge of each site of bloody conflict from the
so-called GreatWar that saw almost 60,000
casualties on the first day, didn’t bring the war
alive and real to us, then the actual rounds
of ammo, some deadly bombs still there a
century later certainly did.” Battlefield tours
enable the visitors to experience history from
a wholly different perspective, and being able
to empathise with the conditions that the
troops on the ground had to experience is an
important part of it.Although the weather was
variable during our weekend on the Somme,
everyone had a wonderful time and came back
more knowledgeable.
OJSB
S u m m e r F i e l d s
2 0 1 5 – 2 0 1 6
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