Page 34 - Eclipse - RVC Alumni Magazine - Autumn 2020

RVC Women’s Rugby Club take on a walk/run/
cycle for charity
Poppy Fennell
When lockdown hit the nation, the RVC Women’s Rugby Club was thrown to the four corners of the country and the end of the rugby season left in pieces.
We wanted to do something that would keep the community going that the club had developed from our weekly training sessions, games and socials. So, we put on our
boots and thought, ‘seeing as we can’t train together, we could still keep fit together’.
To add to the motivation to get fit while
we had a lot of time on our hands, came the idea to raise money for the domestic abuse charity, Refuge. Over a weekend in June, we decided to walk, run and cycle the distance between the homes of English and Welsh rugby (Twickenham, London and The Millennium Stadium, Cardiff) - over 230km!
We started with fundraising target of £500, but after a few advertising videos
of us training, entrusting our families with the objective to support the campaign and raising our target several times, we achieved a bit more.
By the end of the weekend, we had raised a grand total of £4,069! An amazing effort and very much appreciated by Refuge,
as over lockdown the number of cases
of domestic abuse skyrocketed and their services are as in need as ever.
About the club
The club is still going strong, the boom in Women’s Rugby Union has meant we have increased in numbers year-on-year. We are sadly seeing the departure of our much- loved coach of the last three years, but the arrival of a new captain and fresh young coach means our coming season is full of new aspirations for a bigger and better club. The RVC Women’s Rugby Club will always find a way to do something together ... even if it HAS to be fitness for once.
The Performing Arts Society – Legally Blonde
Matty Clarkson, Performing Arts Society President and Artistic Director of Legally Blonde
Legally Blonde 2020: The show that almost never was; the show that was always meant to be.
The directing team for the Performing Art Society’s (PAS) annual musical started their advertising as normal at the start of the 2019 school year, with information for their upcoming show: Les Misérables. Days later, the directors gathered for an emergency meeting to pick a new show, due to licensing issues, only three weeks before auditions and with all of their summer planning scrapped.
Enter Legally Blonde: a show that had already generated interest among PAS members - carrying a well-known title, an amazing soundtrack and story, and a show the directors were thrilled to get started on.
Rehearsals began in late October and
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quickly the directors knew the cast were going to be turning this into one of the
best shows PAS had ever produced. As rehearsals continued, we kept adding more and more into the show, so the production level was matching what we knew the cast would put into the performances.
Come opening night in March, we had a fully built stage, a hand painted sorority house backdrop, functional windows, 10 costume changes for our lead actress, and confetti canons hidden backstage. Both performances were executed flawlessly (a big improvement from The Circuit Breaker Incident from the previous year’s Urinetown). The cast took their final bows, the Sports Centre where it was performed was cleared in less than two hours, and the cast went on to a well- deserved cast party. Little did we know that less than 10 days later, the RVC
would be having to cancel all student run events for the rest of the year.
Legally Blonde became the highest grossing show Performing Arts Society has produced and easily one of the most memorable, for both our audience and all of the amazing students in the production.
Photography by Luke Tomkins