Festival’s young actors’ contests survive Covid restrictions
The Bath-based Mid-somerset Festival has prided itself on running continuously through two World Wars since its founding in 1902, but coronavirus dealt it a bitter blow in March when half the festival had to be cancelled as the country went into lockdown.
One section of the festival that has managed to go ahead is the prestigious Bath Young Actor of the Year competition.
Bath Young Actor of the Year is a celebration of the best drama performances of the festival and on Friday, October 9 five performers competed for the junior and senior titles at The Pound Arts Centre, Corsham.
Each contestant had to produce a ten-minute repertoire on a chosen theme.
Kambua Hilman’s exploration of the theme of ‘Entitlement’ won her the junior cup.
There was a topicality about Kambua’s pieces with Margot, the mayor of a New England town trying to deal with a ‘power’ pandemic, to ‘Strange Fruit,’ the disturbing poem about the lynchings in the southern US states.
The winner of the senior cup was Alexander Spencer Jones, 17. He explored ‘The Self Unseeing’ through extracts from plays such as Stoppard’s play ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Janine Diamond, one of the two adjudicators, said commended him on his “really brave interpretation of such a canonical text.”