Earlier this week, students in the First Form were joined by Year 5 and Year 6 pupils from the Prep School to watch the French play, “Parlez-vous Français?” (Do You Speak French?). Xanthe B and Tess H (both First Form) write about the play below.

“The play was about a silly English boy named Archie France who was on a ski trip with his school. Whilst messing around, skiing backwards, he hurts himself and ends up in a French hospital. Unfortunately for Archie, no one in the hospital speaks English so he had a tough time understanding everyone!

Archie is clearly immature, enjoys messing about and thinks of himself highly. Ms Blanc, Archie’s French Teacher, deeply disapproves of the mess Archie has got himself into. The next character we meet is the French Nurse called Cecile. She is kind, although she only speaks French and Archie speaks English with extraordinarily little knowledge of the French language, so there are many hilarious communication problems.

A mischievous girl called Nicole then enters. She is hiding from her father and through many pranks and problematic interactions, Archie and Nicole start to bond and become friends. They exchange details and there seems to be a blossoming relationship on our hands.

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed this performance as Archie and Nicole interacted with the audience throughout the play. The amount of French vocabulary that we could follow along with was quite shocking and left you feeling rather conceited when there were parts that you could understand when poor ignorant Archie was left bewildered by this new language. Another truly enjoyable part of the production was when Ms Blanc, Nurse Cecile and Nicole changed from one character to another creating slightly-confused, but hilarious reactions from the audience.

I would truly recommend Parlez-vous Français? as a fun way of learning French for beginners. It even had our teachers laughing!”