Cannons Creek Independent High School presented its annual House Plays on Thursday 10 September 2026. The prompt for this year was either ‘Twisted Tropes’ – take a well-known genre, fairy tale and flip it on its head or ‘Stuck in One Place’ – the entire play must take place in a single, high-stakes location where the characters cannot leave. The three houses took up the challenge
to write highly creative scripts with permitted AI assistance. The adjudicator, Mr Wesley Deintje (Dramatic Arts and English teacher at St Cyprian’s School) praised the ingenuity of the scripts as well as the outstanding direction and characterisation.
Riverside: Floor Zero
An intense, comedic breakdown of social hierarchies when a CEO, a janitor, an
influencer and a mime get stuck together.
Lonsdale: Cinderella the Victim
A fairy tale flip sees Cinderella as the self-imposed and self-centred victim and the
evil stepmother just trying to run a structured household.
Peak: Guinea PI
A gritty, 1940s detective drama… but the detective is trying to solve who stole the
classroom guinea pig.
The awards were as follows:
Best Play – Riverside
Best Directors – Isabella Februarie and Hayley Poole (Riverside)
Best Performer – Mia Nasson (Lonsdale)
Best Supporting Performer – Joshua van der Vinne (Riverside)
Best Cameo Role – Nazeem Ebrahim (Lonsdale)
Excellent Characterisation – Naledi Siswana (Riverside)
Excellent Characterisation – Kai de Kock (Riverside)
Excellent Characterisation – Vincent Swanepoel (Peak)
“Well done to the directors, performers and technical crew on a wonderful evening of
high-quality theatrical entertainment,” said Ms Baker (Head of Drama).
Extended commentary:
Here is the full transcript of the video:
Well done for all the work that you’ve done. I must say, you set yourself – or your school set yourself – a bit of a challenge because 10 minutes is so short. And it’s like the McDonald’s of theatre, I suppose. Because it’s like quick, and you’ve got to ensure that because it’s the McDonald’s of theatre and it’s quick takeaway grab from the window, that it like packs a punch when you get it. Every second really becomes precious when you only have 10 minutes to work with. And that’s a challenge. I applaud you for taking up that challenge.
Two things I want you to think about in terms of the storytelling:
Number 1: sound as an aid to your storytelling. Some of the groups used sound quite well, and some of the groups I felt you could have used sound just to even help set the tone before you even start watching. So, while you’re doing your scene change, choosing the right piece of music to kind of set the mood so that you don’t have to do that work yourself when you get on there. So, for example, the Guinea P.I., there, so having like a 1940s noir feel, having some music that kind of felt like that while you were doing the scene change would help you already establish a lot of that mood and that feel. When the lights come up, the music is still playing, and taking a beat before your first actors speak. And then also when you do use sound, just making sure that you’ve crafted your sound as carefully as you have your actors, so that your sound is not overpowering your actors and we can still hear what’s being said, or it’s not coming in late or too early, or makes the audience kind of jump out of their seats and we miss the first few lines that you say.
The next thing is just thinking about the theatrical language. Every play that you do will have its own unique theatrical language, and that’s like a set of rules that you decide what are we going to do in this play, and what is allowed in this play, and what is not allowed in this play. So, for example, a lot of the plays used breaking the fourth wall here and there, but some of the plays I was never quite sure if like you were meaning to break the fourth wall and it was a slip of the actor, or if that was a deliberate choice. So, making sure your theatrical language is very clear from your beginning, that you go, “These are the rules in this world.”
Then, very importantly… is comic timing.If you’ve got a joke – and there were some really lovely jokes. Cinder-whatever, you had some really, really great jokes in there, okay? But they didn’t always land because of the timing. So, you’ve got to work that timing, especially if it’s a joke followed by a joke. So, if you have a joke followed by a joke where you know the audience is going to laugh twice in a row, you’ve got to make sure that you kind of wait for the laugh to happen, to peak, and as that laugh is coming down, then you hit them with the next joke. So, kind of like surfing. You want to catch the wave for the next joke. You don’t want to say the joke before anybody can hear it, because then the audience doesn’t get that joke, or say it when it’s gone too long and then you have to pick up that energy again.
If you’re using comedy, that’s great. Comedy is a great thing, but comedy is actually far harder than drama, because you’ve kind of got to work with that rhythm and those beats.
And then my last kind of general note is watch out for shrieking. Just be careful that you don’t pick up on the pitch of the person’s voice before you. If they’re screaming at you, so they’re screaming over here, and then you speak over here, and the next thing comes out, and then “Ah, yeah!” and then the dogs down the road start howling. Just make sure that like you take a moment. And I think that’s also about the crafting. You don’t always have to be, when you’re angry or when you’re upset, you don’t always have to scream at each other. If you find that energy is getting too frantic, stop and have somebody pause. And think about, you know, when you get into trouble with your parents or whoever, sometimes when there’s dead silence and they just stare at you and they don’t say anything, that’s far more terrifying than actually when they’re shouting. Just sometimes craft that sound and that – that kind of energy building up.
Some quick notes about each play:
Floor Zero: Really nice use of the bottleneck episode. Okay, so a bottleneck episode in a TV series is when they run out of money and then they film the entire episode in a single location to try to save money. And I thought it was a really clever idea to do like a bottleneck episode where everybody was there. Um, it was really creative, but it did pose you with some challenges, blocking being a big one. I thought you had it a moment where the front—the front people sat down, and then we could see the back people and the front people, and I wondered if at times you could have just cheated that, you know, with with Victoria like maybe dropping her papers after she’d said something to pick them up, and while she was bending down picking them up, then the people behind you were talking. Because we sometimes lost what was happening at the back there. So, really loved the idea, but it did obviously present challenges and you just had to work that out there, okay? I thought a lovely collection of characters. I think very often it’s so easy for young actors or young directors to go to stereotypes, and you guys – there were some stereotypes in there that we knew, but there were some really unusual ones like the mime in there. Some really committed performances in this – in this group as well, where people were just focused and, yeah, like were delivering, so well done on that.
Cinderella the Victim: Really nice subversion of our expectations of, you know, Cinderella being a victim and things like that. And like I said, you guys had some really cracker lines. There were some really, really funny lines. Some really nice clowning which happened as well, okay? Cinderella, well done for picking up the dropped line. And that shows me that you’re focused and you’re present and you’re on stage and, you know, you are there 100% in the character.
I think a note here, um, for a couple of the characters-and I think this is where one of the-this is one of the groups where like that 10 minutes maybe limited you a bit because your-your character didn’t really develop other than how we saw them at the beginning to how we saw them at the end. And sometimes in working out that frustration that a character feels, trying to play it differently, that they’re not just going the whole time, “Ugh! Ugh!” trying to work out how do you show that desperation or that frustration in different ways. And that’s for general for acting, okay? Think about it, if people do the same thing over and over again, uh, we get quite bored of—of it, or we get quite frustrated with them. Trying to find different ways of showing that same emotion, whether it be physically, or vocally, or emotionally, or even just in an image, is a nice like trick to use and to explore. Some really good clowning in here. There were some really nice moments in like your blocking, I thought, because everybody on stage, that’s always a challenge, but you handled that-your directors handled that quite well. We knew where to look and we knew what was going on and we knew the focus, and your use of levels there as well with Cinderella on the couch kind of helped direct us to know where to look. So, well done there.
Guinea P.I.: I really love the irreverence of this. I thought it was fantastic. A really nice subversion of the like genre of the like 1940s noir style type thing, which was very, very cool. You had some really lovely characterisation in that group there – the principal, the French teacher, the green tea matcha girl. Some really lovely characters and characterisation. There were some silly ideas, and I think if I could just give you—because I think this has like so much potential, I think two tips I would give this group is just number one, is just—they actually are very similar, really, is the rhythm. Just work on your rhythms. So, imagine a piece of theatre like a piece of music. And if the piece of music is playing at the same tempo the whole time and the beat is the same, we get bored, okay? A piece of music, you know, works and it is really popular because it changes, where we have the chorus coming in and, you know, the rhythm changes, or then we have the bridge and then there’s a whole completely different rhythm. And this is what this needed. It kind of felt like it started and it was frantic from the beginning to the end, and I felt you needed to craft those rhythms. Then strangely enough for me, I almost wanted like a slight hiatus of energy before the big reveal of the hamster being the guinea pig and going around, and then for it to get really frantic-people jumping on tables, like absolute chaos type thing. I think that shifting of rhythm would have helped you a lot. Some really lovely, irreverent, slash funny work.