French Theatre Club performs The Three Musketeers

This year the Junior School French Theatre Club, run by Dr Marie-Geraldine Lea (lecturer in French language and linguistics and Academic Reading at the University of Cambridge when not running the club), put on a spectacular performance of The Three Musketeers which they performed for an hour and a quarter entirely in French!

The club has been running for five years and is filled with new and dedicated pupils every year. The club was set up by Dr Lea in order to show the girls that learning a language is key to discovering other worlds, beliefs, cultures, books and music, before they think about it ‘just’ in terms of examinations.

The French Theatre Club is an inclusive club open to pupils with a wide range of abilities, and although some girls inevitably need more coaching than others, all are incredibly capable. . Whilst lecturing at the University of Cambridge Dr Lea uses a sound discrimination and production technique to help learners produce the new sounds and acquire a good accent and this is the same method she uses with the girls in the club. By using this technique the girls’ accents and rhythm of speech improves a great deal by the time they finish the Junior School in Year 6, and the girls are filled with the confidence to speak clearly and accurately.

Every year Dr Lea and her husband, Mr Jon Lea, take a different French book to turn into a play,  creating the music and the lyrics for the production too. Previous years have seen the club put on productions such as Le Petit Nicolas and Astérix et Obélix: Astérix le Gaulois.

This year the performers took the audience back to Paris in 1625. The girls were amazing as the Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu, the beautiful but cruel spy Milady, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Cardinal's Red Guards. Thanks to Mr Andrew Severy, Junior School Computer Science Co-ordinator,  the performance even included special effects: some fog on the stage and some beautiful lighting. The French Theatre Club is also fortunate to be provided with amazing painted scenery provided by Dr Olena Rudge, mother of two of our students – and this year she painted Notre Dame!

This year’s audience was the biggest yet and all were very pleased and impressed by the girls’ performances, and widely congratulated the team for a fantastic production!