Abingdon News No. 57

14 April 2021 Abingdon News OA drama success Congratulations to former Abingdon drama students Alex Mugnaioni (2007), Steve Hodgetts (2009) and Kit Young (2013) who all appear in high-profile productions on our screens, and to Simon Evans (2002) whose two series of the hit lockdown sitcom Staged have won a raft of awards: After making his National Theatre debut in Dürrenmatt’s The Visit last March, Alex Mugnaioni plays the role of Paris in the NT’s new production of Romeo and Juliet . Steve Hodgetts both co-wrote and starred in a 2018 romantic comedy called Love Possibly , which has just become available on Amazon Prime. Kit Young has carved out a spectacular career since leaving school in 2013 landing key roles in thrilling new productions of Shakespeare plays by Nick Hytner at the Bridge Theatre in London, as well as shows at The Donmar Warehouse and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Now he is set to appear on our screens as Jesper Fahey in a new Netflix series called Shadow and Bone . The impact of Simon Evans’ debut TV series Staged continues to resound. Simon seized the moment last April by successfully pitching, writing, directing and acting in the first series of Staged , a lockdown drama played out on zoom, and featuring a cast of acting royalty that included Michael Sheen, David Tennant, Adrian Lester, Judi Dench, Samuel L Jackson and Nina Sosanya - all playing versions of themselves as they struggle to keep the theatrical flag flying in the face of the pandemic. AFU film success Regeneration , an AFU film from 2007 created by OA Freddie Barber, has been selected by Cambridge University to feature in its ​EU-funded Dialogue and Argumentation for Cultural Literacy Learning in Schools (DIALLS) ​ international ​programme. The AFU was established in 2003 and began by producing purely documentary films, but Regeneration was one of the Unit’s first hand-drawn animations and saw Freddie working with guidance from award-winning animators including Joanna Harrison and Geoff Dunbar. Going South ASP coordinator, Jeremy Thomas co-presented with Holly Irving, Science Coordinator at Caldecott Primary School, at the Association for Science Education’s Annual Conference. Thirty teachers and science educators joined the remote presentation on the ‘Going South’ Primary Science Fair Project developed by Jeremy and Holly. The project was financed by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the first sighting of the Antarctic continent by Edward Barnsfield and supported by the Abingdon ATOM Festival and the UK Science Festivals Network. Lower school puzzles In the first joint lower school tutor period of term, second year mentors met with their first year mentees over Zoom. To mark World Logic Day, they were given some tricky logic puzzles to solve together. Answers on back page Delivering Cicero Students studying Latin in the Fourth Year recorded themselves delivering the opening of one of Cicero’s most famous speeches, the First Catilinarian, delivered in the senate in late 63 BC.