Drama News
In Drama News this week:
Inter-House Drama
Our annual Inter-House Drama competition will take place on Thursday 5 March. Houses have been busy constructing their works since the House Challenge was issued in Term 4 2025.
Houses have been assigned a famous painting to use as the stimulus for their dramatic offerings. It has been pleasing to observe the girls embrace this challenge with imagination, creativity and inventiveness. We look forward to another wonderful day of Thespian triumph and Production panache!
We are thrilled that adjudicating the competition are three dynamic women practitioners from the theatre world:
Deborah Kennedy
Deborah Kennedy is an accomplished Australian actor whose career began on stage with Sydney’s Marian Street Theatre, appearing in classics such as The Trojan Woman and Macbeth. Through the 1970s she performed widely with SUDS, Repertory 200, the New Theatre, the Pageant Theatre and Nimrod, featuring in productions including Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Travelling North and Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Kennedy moved into television with roles in Certain Women, Silent Number, Doctor Down Under, The Restless Years and 1915, alongside film appearances in Tim (1979) and Dawn! (1979). She later featured in Police Rescue, Wildside, Good Guys Bad Guys, and films such as Death in Brunswick, The Sum of Us, and Swimming Upstream. Known nationally for the iconic “Not happy, Jan!” Yellow Pages commercial, Kennedy more recently starred as Doris Collins in A Place to Call Home and appeared in the ABC drama Janet King.
Diana Simmonds
Diana Simmonds is one of Sydney’s best-known and most respected arts critics and commentators. Although it’s not particularly fashionable Diana lives for the arts – theatre, music, opera, visual arts, books and the artists who make these essential things.
She started writing critically and professionally in London, in the dark ages, on Time Out and City Limits magazines; in Australia, since 1985 she has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Bulletin, The Australian and the Sunday Telegraph.
Diana is the author of a number of books of fiction and non-fiction but the elusive bestseller remains elusive. She is a longtime supporter of the Sydney Swans and West Ham FC.
Diana’s online blog Stage Noise is an avidly read portal for theatre criticism and review.
Melanie Tait
Melanie Tait is a Sydney-based playwright and screenwriter whose work is celebrated across Australia and internationally. Her debut play, The Vegemite Tales, became a cult hit in London, running for eight years including two on the West End. Her latest work, The Queen’s Nanny, about Queen Elizabeth II’s former nanny Marion Crawford, received critical and commercial acclaim and begins a national Australian tour in May 2025. The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race premiered at Ensemble Theatre in 2019, toured nationally in 2021, and continues to be staged across Australia and New Zealand; Melanie also adapted it into a feature film released on Paramount+ and Channel 10 in 2023. Her recent plays include A Broadcast Coup (2023), A Model Murder (2025), and How to Plot a Hit in Two Days (premiering August 2025). She currently has new works in development with NIDA, Melbourne Theatre Company, Mudlark Theatre, Easy Tiger and BBC Studios.
Co-Curricular – ‘Girl Asleep’
SCEGGS’ first Drama Production for the year is Girl Asleep by Matthew Whittet. It will be staged over four performances in Week 9 of Term 2 – Wednesday 17 June to Saturday 20 June.
It’s Greta’s 15th birthday and she wishes she could be anywhere else. Strangely enough ‘anywhere else’ is exactly where she finds herself in a peculiar Alice Through-the-Looking-Glass existence that transforms the weird hypocrisy of the adult world into something absurdly beautiful. The bitchy twins who make school a misery, her almost too-romantic imaginary boyfriend, her hyperventilating parents … they all crop up in her tour of her own subconscious mind. But eventually, even a girl asleep has to wake up. A play about being lost in the jungle of teenager-dom and coming out the other side.
The production will be directed by Ms Poppy Lynch.
Auditions will be conducted on Sunday 8 March from 9am to 1pm in the Black Box theatre. Auditionees are expected to attend for the duration.
We invite girls from Year 7 through to Year 12 to audition.
Auditionees will be required to prepare a duologue from the play. This will be forwarded to you once you register to audition. You will not be required to memorise the dialogue.
If you attend to audition, please complete the attached Audition Form and return to Mr Eyers by Monday 2 March.
It’s Bad Luck to Whistle on Stage
While this is another renowned stage superstition, there was an actual reason for this one’s inception. In early theatre, sailors used to be regularly hired to work in the theatres as riggers, stagehands and costumers. Their unique skills with knots, ropes and sewing made them highly sought after. So backstage – before headsets were used – stagehands used whistle commands that originated on ships to communicate. So actors whistling on stage could accidentally cause a premature curtain call, a backdrop being rolled out onto someone, or a prop being thrown in at the wrong time. We don’t use whistle cues any more – but the superstition has stood the test of time.
Peter Eyers
Head of Drama
