Music and acting talent on show at the King’s School

A SCHOOL is humming with top musical and stage talent after six students bagged winning offers from the country’s best performing arts colleges.

King’s School pupil and bassoon player Jenna Salt, 18, from Sutton, has offers from Royal Holloway and Goldsmith’s College to study Music.

Darragh Burke, 18, from Macclesfield, has an offer from the Royal Northern College of Music and is a guitarist with the multi award winning Wigan Youth Jazz Band.

Kate De Campos, 17, from Heaton Chapel, has an offer to study the viola at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Kate is a member of the National Youth Orchestra.

Singer Sacha Allen, 18, from Twemlow Green, has offers from both Royal Holloway and the Royal Northern College of Music to study Popular Music Performance.

Laura Embrey, 18, from Congleton has been offered a place at the Royal Northern College of Music to study the violin and Alex Moore, 18, from Congleton, who has an offer to study Stage Management at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and has already been on a prestigious summer placement at The National Theatre.

Ruth Roberts, the head of the King’s School sixth form, said: “It is wonderful to see so many outstanding young performers and creatives pursue their dreams and win highly prized places at the nation’s top colleges.

“It shows King’s offers much more than rigorous academic work, but has the scope to enable young talent to realise its potential.”

Meanwhile, the acting talent in the sixth form was on display recently when the school staged Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt’s post war tragicomedy The Visit to audiences.

The 1995 play centres on Claire Zachanassian’s abiding desire for revenge on the man who raped her in her youth.

Now rich, famous and baring a million dollar bribe, she returns to the village in which she grew up offering villagers cash in return for the life of the perpetrator Arthur Ill.

Emma Maxwell stared as Claire Zachanassian, Ollie Muir played Alfred Ill, the Mayor was played by Ben Lynch and Abbie Richardson joined them on stage playing the schoolmistress.

King’s Head of Drama, Donald Forbes, said: “The Visit is a modern masterpiece, multi layered and swinging between comedy and despair and a wonderful piece to challenge our developing young actors.”