Lyon House Play - Fire Raisers

Boys from Lyon House who starred and directed the House play, Fire Raisers, give an account of their experiences of taking part, the highlights, challenges and learning:

“Directing a play is hard, acting in a play is hard, combine that with the stress of day to day school life and a short time scale made our production of the Fire Raisers almost as frantic as the play itself. We were not particularly blessed with timing due to the eight week break of a peaceful summer in which the cast should’ve been learning their lines, however we pushed on fast when we got back and made quick progress. I knew that with the lack of timing we would struggle to stick to script completely because surprisingly the boys didn’t learn their lines. With this in mind I was more concerned with the cast understanding their characters, so they could improvise if needed whilst staying in character. Luckily by the time the play came around they relatively knew the script and only had to use a bit of improvisation. I spent a lot of time during summer blocking the play so that the story of the play was clear and easy to understand.

Max Frisch’s Fire Raisers is a very funny play and I do believe we did it justice, working with Ollie Dixon and the rest of the cast was a really great experience, as I feel I got to know them a lot a better than I would’ve normally. Johnny Lye had to be my biggest surprise as I didn’t peg him as such a natural thespian as he portrayed an almost too convincing thug; I thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone and hope I get an opportunity to direct again in the future because it’s a very special experience.  My thanks must go to the cast as they stuck through it even with the anti-social rehearsal hours and produced a play we were all proud of.”

William Davidson, Director (U6g)

“Never have I been in a play which contained so much unintended improvisation, nor a play which left so much to the last minute. However, it finally came together and by the Friday night we felt it went as well as it could have done.

The experience was rather stressful, coming back from a long summer and only having two and a half weeks to prepare a whole performance. So, we began rehearsing with an ambitious schedule which we did not stick to one bit. We did rehearse every night however and ended up rehearsing the first scene of the play at least 25 times, whereas the final dinner scene was about 5 times… that may have been why there was so much improvisation.

Working with Will Davidson as the director was very interesting because he has excellent ideas concerning the play and helped many people who hadn’t done much acting before but being one year apart from your director, it is less easy to take the performance so seriously. He did a great job though and pulled us together in the end. He made it quite clear that if we did not learn our lines, it would be us who were embarrassed rather than him, which was a point that motivated the cast greatly and put our heads in shape for the real performance.

The whole sprint of the play was very enjoyable and hard work at the same time, because we had little time to do hall, although ended up having a lot of laughs in rehearsal – including many moments when Jonty’s acting would send us all into hysterics…

I would certainly do a House play again and would highly recommend it for future years. Will Davidson deserves a lot of credit for the play, so thank you to him!”

Ollie Dixon (L6g)