Failed birthday party hits the stage

Sunday 24 February 2019

Surprise! There's a party going on next week, and islanders are invited, even if it all seems to be going a little wrong.

As it celebrate its 10th anniversary, Drama Labs will take to the stage to present a one-act play about a seemingly failed birthday as part of the National Theatre Connections Youth Theatre Festival 2019.

The theatre group will be premiering 'Stuff’ and ‘Salt’ on 27 and 28 February at the Arts Centre before taking the plays to Warwick Arts Centre in mid March.

Tom Well's 'Stuff' tells the story of Vinny, who is organising a surprise birthday party for his friend, Anita. But not everything is going according to plan: Vinny's choice of venue is a bit misguided, Anita’s not keen on leaving the house, and everyone else has their own stuff going on.

More than just being a play about friendship and loss, the play aims to explore how people try to do the right thing when there isn’t really a right thing to do.

Dawn King's 'Salt', meanwhile, is a play about generations, choices and hope. It tells the story of teens who at the chance to secure their future when a new government initiative offers the chance to train and learn skills overseas, only to find out that the promises of the glossy advert are a far cry from what lies ahead. 

Paul and Pippa Adams, the creative minds behind Drama Lab, are respectively directing 'Stuff' and 'Salt'. Both fell into the show business from a young age, before meeting while working on Cinderella. 

Their Drama Lab adventure started with a workshop in the summer of 2006. "Due to its popularity, parents and students were asking us to open a full-time school, but because we were actively working as professional actors on tour at the time, we could not do this," they explained.

After getting married in 2007 and welcoming their first child soon after, the couple "removed the grease paint and hung up our costumes" before returning home to Jersey with Ralph, who was six months old by then.

Pictured: Pippa and Paul Adams set up Drama Lab 10 years ago.

"We haven’t looked back since," they said. "We started with 60 students and we now have about 300, a dance school, Dance Lab and a theatre company, The Actors Centre Theatre Company, for our graduates."

"We want to carry on nurturing our beautiful students and giving them all the opportunities we possibly can, like we do already," the couple added.

"We love them all like our own and Drama Lab has always kept its ‘heart pumping’ for the amazing families we have in our school and their incredible children. We just love our job, as cheesy as it sounds, because in every lesson someone or something new sparkles and we are all a family and love it that way."

To mark the school's 10th anniversary, the company celebrated in style with a production 'Lords of the Flies' at the Arts Centre followed by ‘Gargantua’ at the Opera House earlier this month. 

Pictured: Next week's plays will be shown at the Arts Centre.

After ‘Stuff’ and ‘Salt', the Drama Lab family will be embarking on a new Easter holiday workshop. Plays will then follow in the summer term, as well as the school's traditional summer Shakespeare plays and Musical Theatre workshop.

This November, they will take to the stage at the Opera House with a "huge Schoo show", ‘His Dark Materials'.