Live performance acting is a lot more difficult than acting in front of a camera. You cannot make any mistakes on stage, but in front of a camera, you can have as many ‘takes’ as you need to get the scene right. Acting in front of hundreds of people outside the country, on a foreign stage and totally outside of your comfort zone is an extremely difficult and eye opening experience. Ipswich is taking on this challenge this summer. This year, Ipswich High School is sending the drama cast and crew to Edinburgh, Scotland to perform “The Princess Plays” with thirty eight other schools from North America.

            Bringing a group of students to Scotland posses many problems for many people. Not only are a total of 37 people flying, but they need to keep the students safe and together the whole time. The good news is that there are six adults going this year, so there is a good ratio of students to chaperone. Edinburgh is not a small town; it has almost 500 thousand people within the city. Controlling anyone in a large city is not an easy job. Having a few extra adults could prove a game changer and make the trip go by thoroughly flawless.

            A two week trip to Scotland is not cheap. This posed another great problem with trying to bring a large cast overseas. A good portion of the cast will not be able to make themselves present at the Edinburgh festival due to time or money constraints, but the show will carry on without them. In the casting process, where Mrs. Faust, the director, assigns roles to the students, she appointed understudies to all of the people who cannot go on the trip. In Scotland, some students have upward of four roles that they need to take on! It will definitely be interesting to see how that will play out.

            With Edinburgh being so massive, there is no shortage of things to do there. Most importantly, there are all of the other schools’ performances to go see. The downside is that there are multiple shows at the same time, so Ipswich cannot attend all of them. “With 38 other performances happening over the two week span, they’ll just have to pick and choose and find what suits them,” said Mrs. Faust, the director of “The Princess Plays” and leader of the trip. That does not mean that there will not be a large variety of shows however. Public and private schools from all around the U.S. and Canada will be attending the festival. “Some could amaze you with how good they are; some might surprise you on how bad they are,” Mrs. Faust said when asked about their “competition.” It is not a competition though. These schools are attending for the festival, not to compete against each other.

            With the large variety of shows, there will be certain ones that the cast and crew members of Ipswich do want to go and see. The majority of the cast said they would love to see some good Shakespeare, and just having done a comedic version of Romeo and Juliet, I do not blame them.

            Though the group leaves to perform “The Princess Plays” in Edinburgh this summer, they will have a set of four performances before they leave to show off what hard work they are bringing overseas. You can catch the Ipswich high school’s cast performing on the 6^th, 7^th and 8^th of May in the Ipswich Performing Arts Center. The ticket prices are $5 for students and seniors and $10 for adults. The students would appreciate the company of everyone and would gladly take any recommendations to take with them on their journey to Edinburgh.