Hysterical history

By Ed Merrison
UPWEY High School students have rewritten history and taken their colourful version of events to this year’s Adelaide Festival of Arts.
The students returned from the South Australian capital last week after performing a six-night run of their show, A Dramatic Look at History.
Upwey drama and English teacher Malcolm Anderson said it was a fabulous experience that gave the students a taste of what festivals were all about.
He said part of the fun was in hitting the streets to hand out leaflets and sell the show which the troupe managed to do with a high degree of success.
The show attracted ‘unbelievable audiences’ and completely sold out on three nights.
“They were great ambassadors for the school and themselves. They were just tremendous,” he said.
The show takes a look at the main events of history in different dramatic styles, squeezing them into roughly 50 minutes of song, dance and skits and warping them through a prism of modern popular culture.
The performance whizzes from the invention of the wheel in Cave Yard Blitz, via the birth of Christ, through Henry VIII as hammed-up soap opera Days of Our Wives, to the Great Plague, the Salem witch trials and onto Jack the Ripper, tried at the hands of American celebrity legal grouch Judge Judy.
The 20th century gets a look-in, too, with a whistle-stop tour of the Great Depression, World War II, the swinging ’60s, disco ’70s, daggy ’80s and Seinfeld ’90s to arrive, spewed up by the Spice Girls, in the present day.
Mr Anderson said it would be stretching the truth to call the venture a cross-curricular exercise.
“It sort of does work as a history lesson, as long as you take it with a pinch of salt. We were just going for cheap laughs, really,” he said.
The cast, which was labelled ‘highly talented and passionate’ in a review in major Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser, performed at the centrally located Worldsend Hotel and managed to get out and see a couple of other shows.