Chronicle Summer 2023

35 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

O thello By Airlie Scott, Teacher of Drama

Once again, forward-thinking director Katrina Eden and the talented Teddies Drama Department impressed and challenged North Wall audiences, this time by staging one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, Othello. Successfully tackling the complex language, rhythms, and iambic pentameter, as well as grappling with its age-old themes of the dangers of prejudice and jealousy, the St Edward’s production was not content to leave it there. This was no conventional and traditional interpretation of the classic but an inspired and progressive re-imagining for a contemporary audience. Eden’s vision for the play sets it in an imagined but not so distant dystopian future just beyond our own – a hot and barren landscape, where humanity is fighting over the last fragments of land after the dire effects of rising sea levels and global warming. This cracked and broken landscape mirrors the ever-increasing splintering of once solid and loving relationships, amidst a melting pot of racial hatred, tension and division. To stage right an upturned fragment of a washed-up boat hull; above, a diamond tube of oppressive light pulses and flickers; all around a haze of heat and dust; whilst beneath, a low drone persists and unnerves as our unease unfolds. Subconsciously hinting at what is to come right from

the start, the audience is immediately absorbed by the evocative set (by designer Mayou Trikerioti) within this apocalyptic vision.

Sade McNichols-Thomas as Othello