Drama at Denmark Road offers the chance for students to challenge themselves to develop a range of practical and personal skills. Across Key Stage 3 and 4, students must work independently and collaboratively to react to, and understand, stimuli and scripts and make creative choices in their interpretations. We are proud of the pressure this puts students under. In all drama lessons we seek to explore and expose how theatre can be performed to entertain, question, to challenge and to express complex ideas around society, politics and humanity.
Drama at Denmark Road has grown massively over the last five years, from teaching GCSE for the first time in 2020, to moving into a brilliant new space and launching A Level in September 2026. In every lesson, students develop and refine real-world skills of communication, collaboration, creativity, independence, organisation and many more.
We work with students twice a fortnight at KS3 and offer the subject as option at GCSE and A Level. We begin Year 7 assuming no prior study of the subject and focus on developing a range of skills: from working responsibly and safely, to physical and vocal communication, staging, directing, design skills and written evaluation. Students study a range of engaging and challenging set texts including the full texts ‘A Monster Calls’ and ‘DNA’. We foster close ties with the English Department and use content from texts already tackled by students including ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘Medusa’, ‘Macbeth’ and more meaning we can focus and hone skills in performance, design and reflection- essential to anyone interested in succeeding in the subject.
At GCSE we study the Eduqas specification - for more information on the outline of the course click here. We currently have over 70 students studying Drama in Years 10 and 11. At A Level we follow the Edexcel Drama and Theatre with set texts Equus and Lysistrata.
We’re very proud of the hard work that goes into extra curricular Drama at DRHS. We currently produce KS4 and KS5 Drama in February each year- you can watch previous trailers here for ‘Find Me’ (Feb, 2025) and ‘Anti-Hero’ (Feb, 2026). We also collaborate extensively with the Music department to produce a whole-school musical in Term 6. This year it will be ‘Into the Woods’. Recently we’ve produced ‘Legally Blonde’ and ‘Matilda’ as whole-school shows.
We take students on multiple theatre trips every year to watch live shows from internationally renowned directors and companies including Frantic Assembly, Emma Rice, The RSC, Complicite, Splendid and many more.
For more information on the department please contact Mr Fitch, Subject Leader for Drama and Media Marketing.
