On Friday 4 December Futures Theatre Company performed their play Fear to Bully in the school hall. In the play the central character Jules is being bullied by a girl at her school. The bully uses Jules’s brother to get her phone number in order to pester her with nasty text messages. The bullying gets worse as Lavinya (the bully) then starts to put nasty images of Jules on the computer. Lavinya then turns up at a dancing competition that Jules is appearing in were backstage she teases and humiliates her. Jules feels that there is only one way out and she takes her own life just before she is about to go on stage and dance. The ending of the play is tragic as Jules does not regain consciousness.

 

After the performance the actors led a ‘forum’ theatre workshop. Forum theatre is when the audience are encouraged to reshape the ending of a play and make suggestions for a more positive outcome. Students at Elmgreen made some excellent suggestions for how the story could have ended differently.

 

To their surprise some of the students were then invited up on stage to ‘act out’ their ideas with the actors. The result was a more positive ending to the play in which Jules wins the competition, gets a date, and more importantly, Lavinya apologises.