Third year of high school was the year of tragedies.

We studied the three main ones - Macbeth, Hamlet and of course Romeo & Juliet. We studied them in class each for two weeks then spent the rest of the time on rehearsals for the various parts we were given. We weren't really allowed to audition but our teacher assured us that the castings weren't completely random, claimed that she put us up for role that she thought we could embody best. Which I think explains why the goth kid got casted as Hamlet and a trio of girls who were so close together that sometimes they spoke in a coded language when they didn't want people around them to know what they were talking about as the Weird Sisters. Everyone got a part in every play but it was rare for anyone to get a major part in more than one play.

We were determined to have fun that year since it was our last year of Shakespeare plays. We had studied the comedies in the first year (The Tempest, Midsummers Night's Dream, Twelfth Night) and then we did Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar as our history plays. Since some of the history plays we studied also doubled as tragedies, we already had some familiarity with the nature of Shakespeare tragedies and most of us had agreed that we greatly preferred them to the comedies.

Every moment of the readings, rehearsals and performances felt like a new ending because it was marked with the knowledge that it was the last time we would ever do it. So we memorised even more scenes by heart, randomly breaking into character at lunch times in the cafeteria and even the most reserved among us did not hold back their passion in those spontaneous moments. We were all motivated with the knowledge that it was the last time.

It was fitting that we studied the tragedies last. The absence of the plays from our lives was not unlike a tragedy itself.