Class 12 Play Festival 2025

The Class 12 plays are a key moment in the Waldorf upper school curriculum around the world. While they are also busy with more individual projects, the plays are an opportunity to really exercise their skills in the social sphere in terms of practising teamwork and bringing a project to a conclusion: so while they are taken on through the creative medium of a drama production, the lessons are skills for life and adulthood! To this end, we facilitate the process and create the guidelines, but many of the major decisions are made by the students in negotiation with each other, including casting, rehearsal schedules, choice of plays, and then many aspects of the production, from directing to set building and designing, to costumes and props. Many of the skills they’ve built up over the years in the Waldorf school will come to the fore here during the course of the process; but it’s also a chance to really practise “soft skills” of the kind organisations worldwide are calling for: how to work alongside people you don’t naturally align with, for a common goal, for example!

 

This year’s process of choosing plays was an interesting one in that these young adults really felt the desire to tackle some more mature themes with their plays. We also find that many modern plays written in the last fifty years or so tend to deal with more challenging ‘current issues’ as a matter of course. This has of course happened often in the past at Constantia Waldorf, and so while we hope you’ll come to support this year’s plays, do please also be aware that there is a “13+” age restriction for both plays due to both language and content.

 

Sordid Lives is a dark comedy by the Broadway director and writer Del Shores, which has taken on the status of a cult classic! It tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young actor returning from New York to Texas in the 1990s, on the occasion of his conservative grandmother’s passing, and choosing this as the moment to come out as gay to his mother. However, he has arrived in a situation of muddled low-life confusion; mostly caused by the manner of his grandmother’s unexpected demise in a motel room. Crazy Southern characters and dark family secrets are revealed along the way!

The History Boys by Alan Bennett (writer of many well-known screenplays like ‘The Madness of King George’) is a multi-award-winning play about, well, teenage boys at school in the 1980s. They’re bright, they’re coarse, they’re competing to get into top universities at the same time as discovering what they really want to believe in, alongside other teenage preoccupations like sexuality and rugby. Their teachers have different ways of approaching them, moving them as well as being moved by them; and the teachers themselves show their foibles and insecurities as much as the boys. A modern classic performed on the mainstream stage but also in other high schools around the world. Thoughtful, funny, and sad.