Excellence in Performance: Shakespeare By Heart Competition

Shakespeare’s language is difficult.

It demands to be made sense of.

And in many ways one of the best ways to develop mastery of the language’s complexities is to take it and eternalise it by learning it off by heart, to come to know and feel it. This is exactly what the whole of Year 7 did as part of the annual Shakespeare Off By Heart Contest.

This year the standard was exceptionally high with the fourteen finalists exhibiting a wonderful level of understanding: understanding of temperament, of emotion, of situation, and how the various characters come to say what they say. They did this with fluency, clarity, confidence and poise.

Mrs Morris-Wolffe, this year’s Senior Judge, used Hamlet’s advice to the players, “hold a mirror up to nature”, to differentiate the top performers. She explained how both Frankie Flaum and Fraser Hauser, this year’s Runners Up, managed to make their speeches come alive with a genuine and sincere delivery that captured the essence of the speaker. She highlighted how this year’s winner, Vernilan Vishnukumar, managed to eternalise the speech and become the character and make it seem as though the lines were being spoken in the moment.

A big congratulations to the winners and to all those who took part.