Jan 12 2009
Immaturity
Sometimes I wonder about the students at college. They lack the sensibility and maturity of thespians. Basically I go to a prestigious drama school in London. Its extremely hard to get into and it was really important to me to get in. I have no drama qualifications and I’ve never worked backstage at a theatre - therefore I consider myself very lucky to have gotten in. I’m part of one half of the school that deals with the production, rather than the other half: acting, such as my degree Costume Production.
I had two lectures today, the morning lecture was boring as usual for Monday morning, no one ever pays attention and I ended up drawing a couple of WoW characters. The second lecture after lunch is a Text lecture in which we study plays to better understand our industry. It doesn’t interest me much and isn’t really relevant to my degree as all I’ll ever be doing is making costumes not designing them. But its good to know these things nonetheless. Today’s discussion was about a play called The Wonderful World of Dissocia - kind of a Alice meets Oz parody.
So of course this lead to discussion about Alice in Wonderland and the writer Lewis Carroll. It came to light that he loved children, especially girls and also had a passion for photography. Can you tell whats coming? Basically he took photos of nude girls. This is when the whole room started sniggering and calling him a paedophile. The point is though that he wasn’t, he was just a child himself and it made him happy, he was never accused of anything and most of the girls grew up got married and had nothing but praise to say about him. The tutor desperately tried to convey this, trying to explain that it was Victorian England and society was very different then. But that was it - the room was shook up now and no one would let it go. She even tried to use J.M.Barrie as an example (the writer of Peter Pan), he wasn’t a paedo.
Basically the room just sniggered at everything from that point on. There was this annoying lick arse in the back row cracking pathetic jokes to his friends to make himself look cool. But he just didn’t.
I got quite fed up and just wanted to tell people they should be ashamed. That it was their modern sick minds that was twisting it. And the poor tutor was just trying to carry on with the lesson.
My question is: Since when have theatre folk been so goddamn immature? I worked hard to get into drama school and I’m not gonna sit in my lectures and take the piss out of everything. I may not agree with a lot of what is being taught to me but I believe that a little bit of respect and understanding is needed.
