High drama

When Penrith Christian School Drama Teacher Marnie O’Mara dishes out advice on learning lines, her students know she’s speaking from experience.

Marnie’s performance history goes back years. As one of five children, in her younger years Marnie and her siblings would regularly stage in-house productions and “entertain the grown-ups”. Then there were the school musicals and ballet school – all feeding into her passion.

While drama remained Marnie’s passion, she originally trained as an English teacher, with Drama a sub-major.

“Twenty years ago Drama was not a major subject,” she says. “It wasn’t even in the HSC.”

But it was a major passion of Marnie’s, so when her friends set up a theatre company, Chalkdust, she was involved from the start - and she wasn’t the only Drama teacher on board.

“Because we had a theatre company it provided us with opportunities as teachers not only to perform on stage to practise what we preached.”

Many students and their parents attend Marnie’s productions, with a few participating earlier this year in a production of The Taming of the Shrew.

“Some of the students had to attend regular weekend and evening rehearsals and take direction from someone other than a teacher.

“Having students attend these productions lends credibility to what they are learning. So when I say that it takes hours to learn the lines and you can’t just get up there and wing it, they know I’m speaking from experience.”

Her students can be a tough crowd.

“Students are the most critical, which keeps me honest. They know that I know how hard it really is.”

Drama teachers commonly do a lot of in-servicing in addition to their teacher training and actor/director training, says Marnie, who has completed courses at NIDA, The Actors’ Centre and the Actors College of Theatre and Television.

“In-servicing hones our skills and connects us with others. It’s great to immerse ourselves and to have the outside directing and involvement happening in addition to what we are doing in schools.”

Earlier in the year Marnie was attending four nights of rehearsals a week and she says there is “always something on the boil” production-wise. She says part of her passion is selfish because she loves drama, theatre and creating “but without an audience there is no drama”.

“In my current situation, working in western Sydney, sometimes these things can seem out of reach for students and for the community. So this is also about bringing it to them.”

Many students go through a stage of wanting to be an actor, director or film-maker but Marnie says whether or not these are the careers they ultimately choose, there are numerous benefits to being exposed to Drama at school.

“They choose it because they love it but we also know it helps with speaking skills, presentation and confidence, and it provides an understanding of how people respond differently in different situations.

“We always say Drama reflects real life, so it is allowing them to explore what is happening in the world. We can read something in class and explore all the influences and subtexts. Drama allows us to explore life in a safe way and prepares us for life.”

Marnie says musical theatre sells well in Australia and sometimes there’s a perception that regular plays are elitist, “but there is always good theatre being generated with plenty of good playwrights, directors and high quality actors around”.

“For Drama teachers, part of what we do is show students that there is more to Drama than just acting and more to productions than musical theatre,” she says.

“It’s also about more than playing games and having fun. It is fun, but there is a lot of hard work as well and we do it because we love it.”