If you are a boy, aged under 65 and entered LGS at the age of 11 then you will remember that you were forced to perform in public at the end of your first term in the School. Over the years what you have been asked to do has varied but for many of you it did involve wearing a dress!
‘Just before the end of the Autumn Term (1972), the Hodson Hall was visited by Thomas Burton’s Flying Christmas Menagerie, known more simply as the First Year Evening. Parents and friends of first-formers came in to be entertained by a dramatic reading from ‘A Christmas Carol’, the court scene from ‘Toad of Toad Hall’, the ‘Merry Minstrels and a highly original version of ‘Robin Hood’; there were various exhibitions to be looked at (including astronomy), refreshments to be relished and – finally – carols to be sung. The whole evening proved to be a worthwhile experiment.’ This was how the very first evening, produced by Stephen Smith, in 1972 was reported in The Loughburian and such was the success of the ‘experiment’ that it is still going strong today and this December saw the 54th production – ‘Mother Goose’ previously performed in 2014.
In the early years the format saw separate ‘sketches’ written by the staff but in 1976 the whole format changed when the boys acted a full scale pantomime ‘Ali Baba’ and the Forty (or so) Thieves’…with an 11 year old Jeremy Parton as ‘Solem’, half of ‘Solem and Heelem’ the cobblers!!! 49 years later he is still responsible for it!
For the first 30 years the evening occupied a single night in the Hodson Hall but both the arrival of the Drama Studio and the School’s first ‘Head of Drama’, Julian Rees, led to significant changes to the evening which moved venue and was spread over two nights, with the same script but different boys each night.
10 years later came another significant change when a professional producer, Jeremy Stroughair, was employed not only to produce the evening but more importantly to provide professional costumes. He, himself, performed each year in pantomime and from 2012’s ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ the quality of the evening improved exponentially.
Not even Covid could stop the evening in 2020. By incorporating Jeremy Stroughair into the Year 7 ‘bubble’ the evening could go ahead as usual but this time with a limited ‘live’ audience and the production of ‘Cinderella’ being streamed online to proud parents.
You can read a full history of the evening here.
