St Edward's Chronicle October 2016

24 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Pastoral Leaders

What sort of job prepares you to be a Matron? We all came from very different jobs! We have one colleague who was a Headteacher, another who used to be in the police force and another who worked on a cruise ship before coming to St Edward’s - and who is also a qualified speech and drama teacher; there are plenty of useful skills in all these roles! Cassie: I trained as a lawyer, then worked as an events planner and then as a retail manager; I’ve been here for three years now. Jacqui: I ran my own catering business for 16 years, then ran a Forest School and then

Julie: Being part of the boarding house is a wonderful feeling – there is a tremendous sense of togetherness and fun. At the end of term, I went with the HM Simon Roche and the Prefects to Swanage for their Prefect training – it was a complete joy to see them all working together outside School and looking forward to their leadership roles. Jacqui: It is quite simply good for the soul to be around young people who never cease to surprise and impress us – and never a day goes by when they don’t make us smile! Iqbal worked on the play in London for five days – helping the actors to get to grips with the business of an entirely new script, working with two young assistant directors, a sound designer and the writer. The project was an exploration of the work as well as an education for the participants in how to approach a new text. The cast and crew then moved in to the theatre here in Oxford and opened rehearsals up to the Drama pupils lucky enough to have classes on that day. It was great for me to be able to go straight from observing the rehearsal to a GCSE Drama class and talk to them about what they had seen. They had some very interesting questions! The piece was performed as a ‘staged reading’ after the rehearsals. We hope to go on and develop the play further with Iqbal. Opportunities like this for young writers and actors are very rare. In theatre, you can only really learn by doing and The North Wall remains committed to giving emerging artists from all backgrounds the opportunities to do this. They are, after all, the future of our culture.

became a Matron in a Prep School. I joined St Edward’s a year ago. Julie: I was a nanny, and when the time came for the children to go to senior school, they came to St Edward’s and I found myself applying for a job here – and I’ve now been here for seven years. What do you enjoy most about your role? Cassie: Watching the girls develop into rounded, confident young women is an endless source of satisfaction and pride. And the often quite ridiculous banter keeps you on your toes!

The NorthWall: Iqbal Khan By Lucy Maycock, Artistic Director

The theatre director, Iqbal Khan, has been working with The North Wall on a piece of new writing by a recent Oxford graduate, Nathan Ellis. Iqbal is an extraordinary artist who has recently directed Othello at the RSC and Macbeth at the Globe. His next project is Anthony and Cleopatra at the RSC as part of their Roman plays series. With Iqbal’s clear love of classical text, it was a rather wonderful thing to discover his commitment to new writing and to helping emerging artists. We met when he toured a production of a new play – Snookered – to The North Wall a few years ago. He loved the building and particularly the theatre. From a first conversation, he seemed like just the kind of artist The North Wall looks for – interested in young writers, actors and directors, generous with his time, democratic in his process and working at the top of his game.

So…when we decided to expand our ArtsLab new writing work to include a week-long rehearsal on a new script during September, Iqbal was the perfect person to ask to lead and mentor the project. We put a call-out to the young writers that we have worked with over the past three years and asked them to send a finished script of a play that had not been performed. From a number of submissions, we selected a short list of four. Iqbal made the final choice and we assembled a cast of six actors also drawn from our ArtsLab ‘stable’. The play he chose was The Disintegration Loops by Nathan Ellis. It is an ambitious and explosive piece of writing that has a dynamic, complicated and intelligent female character at its centre – a girl called Iphigenia or Iff for short.