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A Sevenoaks-educated Shakespeare star |
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Page 2 of 7
“None at all,” is his answer. He was at prep school in
Tonbridge when he was taken to see Huckleberry Finn in the Sackville
Theatre at Sevenoaks School, and was instantly hooked. “I was trying to
choose which secondary school to go to at the time. Huckleberry Finn
was amazing. I thought, I’ve got to be there to do this. I managed to
scrape a scholarship to get in and immediately threw myself into drama
at the school.
There was a fantastic drama teacher at the time called
Jim Edwards who ran the theatre like a professional theatre. You were
expected to learn and do all the different tasks around the theatre,
the lighting, the sound, the stage management, how it all worked. In my
first year I was a non-speaking spear carrier in Romeo and Juliet,
which whetted my appetite. There was a tremendous community in the
school around the theatre.”
After GCSE drama, he joined a tour organised by Sevenoaks teacher
Roger Woodward of The Ragged Child to eastern Europe. “We were in
Prague at a theatre just off the Charles bridge, performing to hundreds
of flower-throwing Poles and Czechs.
It was extraordinary to tour with
a school theatre company to Prague just under a year after the Iron
Curtain had fallen in 1990. And then I joined the West Kent Youth
Theatre which was run by Diana Edwardes and Kieron Winn, who were both
great luminaries, fantastic enthusiasts for theatre and getting people
involved in acting. I did a production of The Fair Maid of the West
which toured around Kent and came to the Stag.” Streatfeild only had a
small part but managed to make the most of it. “One of my roles was a
dead body, and I made a point of not blinking in the entire 20 minute
scene. I used to just about manage it.”
In the sixth form he performed in Camille by Pam Gems and in
Sophocles’ Antigone, in which he played Creon, directed by classics
teacher Andy Waldron, who has now returned to Sevenoaks to teach drama.
“We also did The Relapse, and I played Lord Foppington. I was involved
in everything and if I wasn’t acting, I would try to stage manage.”
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Last Updated ( Monday, 07 July 2008 )
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