Our school has a long and rich history of theatrical productions at the Hawkesdale Memorial Hall, and of its students being involved in acting, singing, dancing, playing instruments, creating props, producing costumery and working backstage. The first play held at the Hall happened back in 1963, with staff and students from the then High School performing in the Happiest Days of your Life – a comedic farce about the complications that ensue when a paperwork error causes a girls' school to share premises with a boys' school. Plays in the years that followed included The King and I, Ned Kelly, numerous comic operas from Gilbert and Sullivan, Cinderella and the Frog, Grease, music hall melodramas such as Only an Orphan Girl and Beauty Sleep, Aladdin, Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and the Man of Steel. Such was the quality of these performances that the Memorial Hall was packed with audience members for night after night, with the polished wooden stage playing host to a variety of characters in elaborate costume over the years, plus several pantomime horses, a memorable Elvis impersonation by a young Evan Nagorcka, calisthenics and gymnastics, and enthusiastic community singing. Staff and students even took Hawkesdale theatrical productions on the road in the 1970’s, taking to the stage for a number of years at the Portland Drama Festival.
Ms Rose Gunn was a teacher at the Hawkesdale High School for nearly four decades, and is well-remembered for her role in directing entertaining productions at the Hall. She had an enormous passion for theatre and dance, as well as developing a love of acting, comedy and public speaking in her students, and produced many of the plays and comedic operas mentioned above between her arrival at the school in 1965 and her retirement in 2002. Mrs Anne Mirtschin, who retires from our school at the end of this year, was the musical director for many of these plays from 1987 onwards. There is an enormous sense that staff and students were whole-hearted in their contributions to plays and performances held at the Hall, and that audiences experienced excellent local theatre that was fun, colourful and full of endless good-humour. Rose Gunn passed away earlier this year, with her love of theatre still going strong, and her interest in the country school in which she had taught for so many decades undiminished. It is enormously fitting that The Tempest Reimagined is staged this year in the Hawkesdale Memorial Hall, where so many school performances have occurred in the past under the guidance of Rose.
During the past decade and more playwright, Rosemary Johns, and actor/choreographer, Carloyn Myers-Bock, have added to this local performing tradition, transforming our College Stadium into a huge theatre-in-the-round space, and with students from Years P-12 taking on acting, singing, choir, dance and instrumental band roles. Past performances in the Stadium have included The Golden Fleece (2011), A Winter’s Tale (2012), Helen of Troy (2014), The White Mouse (2016) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2018).
From 2023 we have gone back to perform in the Hawkesdale Memorial Hall with The Tempest Reimagined (2023) and in 2024 – Twelfth Night in the Great Southern Land. Rosemary produce bespoke scripts that are unique and exclusive to our school, and that reimagine Homeric, Shakespearian and modern tales in a form that can be performed by students from Prep to Year 12. Modern technology has allowed these performances to become spectacular lightscapes and soundscapes, highlighting the prop-making skills of Denise Regan and Megan Russell, and the theatrical talents of staff, past students and current students young and older. John Gunn, the brother of Rose, was the lighting technician and dramatic collaborator for many of these performances, continuing on a connection with earlier productions, until he passed away in early 2024. Our most recent production was dedicated to him.