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Marzena Kochanska's English A2 class, along with a couple of other students outside the A2 set, were given the opportunity to go to London for an evening in order to see the play Oleanna, a play studied by the A2 set as part of the IB syllabus. Two famous actors - Julia Stiles and Aaron Eckhart also acted as a bonus. Julia Stiles also featured in many films such as Ten things I hate about you and Save the last dance.

Oleanna itself has many different themes attached to it. Themes and issues such as: Sexual harassment in an educational context; effect of political correctness on human relations and a focus on the relationship between teacher and student.

The play is about Carol (a student) and John (a teacher). Carol is scared of failure, of failing her course, and walks into John's office to talk about her grades and slow progress in class. He tries to motivate her and tell her that it will all be fine as long as she has extra tutorials with him. Later on in the play Carol complains about John due to these remarks, suggestions to be with him alone and accuses him of sexual harassment.

The play goes on with the audience constantly jumping from side to side. When Carol is talking to John and she gets emotionally upset and is about to tell him some important and personal issues the phone rings and John ignores Carol straight away and picks up the phone - this makes the audience frustrated with John and sympathises with Carol who is so vulnerable at this stage. On the other hand Carol comes across as non-entity, she is slightly alienated as a character by the audience due to her first scene appearance. She is shy, unsure and intellectually of a lower level and doesn't understand why she doesn't understand the material covered in class. She asks John some very personal questions and invades his space by turning up without an appointment. As the play goes on the tension builds up on both sides of the characters (John getting more and more frustrated with her being in the way of his personal life and Carol gets infuriated by not understanding her work and why John said the things he did).

This tension ended up with a 'Big Bang', or more precisely with John taking out his aggression on Carol - he slapped her and the play ends with John holding a chair above Carol, who at this point is lying on the floor curled up to protect herself.

All these effects consistently play in the audiences mind and although the students' opinions on who was wrong or right were all sympathising towards John nearer the end, it certainly left the remaining audience in the theatre puzzled. The day was rounded off with Julia Stiles being grabbed by all of us in order to make a group picture to remember our special day.