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A performance of Othello by the School’s senior actors has been roundly praised by a representative of the Shakespeare Schools Festival.

The production of the tragedy, performed during the SSF at the Arts Depot in Finchley and then again in School to Year 11, was a central part of the inaugural QE Shakespeare Festival. This week-long celebration of the works of England’s greatest playwright was brought to an end by an “inspiring” and “hugely entertaining” lecture to Year 10 from John Mullan, a professor of English at University College London.

In her written appraisal of the performance addressed to the cast of 18 boys from Years 9–13, Lisa Ors, of the SSF, said: “Congratulations on a dramatic, dynamic and deadly production. Staging a Shakespeare play in these changing times takes extra courage, tenacity, and creativity. You should be incredibly proud of what you and your teachers have achieved.”

Praising their “brilliant evening of theatre”, she singled out various elements, such as: their use of space and the “wonderful stage pictures” they created “including the opening scene on a motorbike”; the “effective use” of lighting and sound; their “fantastic” characterisation; their use of gesture, and their deployment of “varied vocal qualities to convey emotion with clarity”.

QE’s Othello was also lauded by the School’s Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement), Crispin Bonham-Carter, whose own background is as a well-known professional actor and theatre director.

“Our boys’ performance of Othello at the Arts Depot and again at School was a dark journey into the psychology of jealousy and revenge.  Patrick Bivol [Year 11] played Iago with a hands-in-pockets insouciance that made his lies and plotting deliciously painful to watch, while Sultan Khokhar [Year 13] gave the Moor [Othello himself] a calm nobility as he met his tragic downfall.

“The protagonists were brilliantly supported by one of the strongest ensembles we’ve seen in QE drama. Keiaron Joseph [Year 11] was particularly moving as the faithful Desdemona, and Augie Bickers [Year 10] set new standards in drunk acting as the reputationally challenged Cassio.

“This was a genuinely entertaining piece of theatre and is a great reflection of the progress that drama here has made in recent years. Our resident director, Gavin Molloy, treats the boys as professionals, and this cast should be extremely proud of themselves.”

In his talk to Year 10, Professor Mullan, Head of Department and The Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature at UCL, asked the boys: “What links the following words: assassination, bloodstained, cold-blooded, deafening, fashionable, lonely, undress, vulnerable?”

The answer is, of course, Shakespeare, he said. “He invented nearly 2,000 words never seen before in the English language.”

Professor Mullan is a regular TV and radio broadcaster and a literary journalist; he writes on contemporary fiction for The Guardian and was a judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

Mr Bonham-Carter said: “Professor Mullan was hugely entertaining and made a passionate case for further literature studies, noting, in passing, that his English Literature graduates were going on to the highest-earning jobs of all UCL’s departments…”

“Year 10 listened intently and asked many intelligent questions.”

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My thanks go to my colleagues and the boys for making our inaugural QE Shakespeare festival a resounding success, with Othello an undoubted highlight and Professor Mullan’s visit constituting a very satisfying conclusion. A perusal of our archives at QE Collections will reveal that the resurgence of drama in recent years picks up on an older tradition of offering high-quality productions here.

“In fact, our connections with the theatre go back to the time of Shakespeare himself, and even a little before that. Court favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who successfully petitioned Queen Elizabeth I for the School’s founding charter, granted in 1573, was an important patron of theatre in Tudor England, supporting his own troupe, Leicester’s Men, and the establishment of the Theatre in Shoreditch, forerunner of London’s famous Globe Theatre.

“As we approach our 450^th anniversary next year, I am very proud to see current Elizabethans take up the mantle of delivering excellence in areas such as drama, oratory and debate.”

• Next up for QE’s thespians is courtroom drama, with a production of Twelve Angry Men planned for the Summer Term.

With their impressive and impassioned delivery of Shakespeare’s best-known speeches, finalists in a Year 8 competition gave their classmates a powerful reminder that the bard’s plays were written for the stage, not the classroom.

Twelve young dramatists declaimed some of the most famous passages in the English language in front of their whole year group in the inter-House Performing Shakespeare competition – part of the inaugural QE Shakespeare Festival Week.

Congratulating all the finalists, Headmaster Neil Enright said it was perhaps particularly fitting that the overall individual winner, Soham Sapra, is a member of Leicester House, since that is named after the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley.

“It was Leicester, one of the great figures of the Elizabethan age, a leading patron of the theatre and, of course, a near-contemporary of Shakespeare, who, in 1573, asked Queen Elizabeth I for the Charter to establish Queen Elizabeth’s School,” said Mr Enright. “Thus, our Shakespeare Festival Week in a sense honours his legacy to the arts as we prepare to celebrate the 450^th anniversary of our School next year. We are seeking to build on that legacy today through promoting drama and through the central importance we attach to oracy and verbal communication.”

The troupe of actors known as Leicester’s Men was the first travelling troupe to receive a royal licence under Elizabeth I. Its members included Will Kemp, who was later associated with Shakespeare, and James Burbage, who built The Theatre in Shoreditch, London’s first purpose-built theatre, which gave Leicester’s Men a permanent performance base. The design of the Theatre was very much like the original Globe Theatre, built in 1599 by Shakespeare’s playing company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

The Performing Shakespeare competition began in the second half of the Autumn Term, when all boys in Year 8 were asked to select a Shakespeare speech to learn by heart and perform. This accompanied their curriculum studies of Othello.

For the final, the English department drafted in their own panel of ‘guest’ judges – History and Politics teacher Liam Hargadon, Head of Geography Emily Parry and Mrs Elaine White, retired teacher of drama at QE. The event was hosted by Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement) Crispin Bonham-Carter.

The audience and judges heard some of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches, including Hamlet’s “To be or not to be?”, Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger?”, and Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach, dear friends”.

The performers were judged not only on their physical performance and their vocalisation, but on how far their performance suited the speech, and on the extent to which their interpretation of the speech met their artistic intention.

Individual winner Soham chose the famous “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy spoken by the melancholy fool Jaques in As You Like It.

Head of English Robert Hyland said: “Soham gave an impressively accomplished performance, using different physical and vocal mannerisms to present each character in their speech with their own personality, and finished his speech by slowing down the pace of delivery and keeping his audience hooked.

“The overall House winner was Stapylton; Snehal Das gave a powerful empathetic performance as Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, and Nimesh Nirojan seemed like he was speaking to thousands in the Roman forum as he gave Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar.”

The ability to perform Shakespeare’s speeches is integral to pupils’ understanding of the playwright, said Mr Hyland. “They are reminded that Shakespeare’s plays were never meant to be studied in class, but performed in theatres. Learning and performing a speech requires students to make judgements about what a character is saying, and how this will affect things like their movement, their vocal tone, and their interaction with the audience, in a way which analysis in an essay can never do.”

QE is to hold what is believed to be the School’s first-ever Shakespeare festival this term – and senior boys got into practice in a professionally-led workshop on Othello.

Boys from Years 10-13 will be performing the tragedy – which, with its themes of jealousy, race and passion, remains as popular as ever today – in the Shakespeare Schools Festival on 23^rd February at the Arts Depot in Finchley.

The production will also form part of QE’s homegrown Shakespeare festival, along with a diverse programme of other activities, ranging from an academic lecture to an inter-House competition.

The afternoon workshop was run by Emma Howell of the Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation, which organises the national schools festival.

Assistant Head Crispin Bonham-Carter (Pupil Involvement) said: “Shakespeare was ten years old when QE was founded, making him an exact contemporary of the School’s very first intake of boys. It’s really exciting to be celebrating him by holding our own festival, which will include the Othello production.”

“Othello will also continue our strong record of participation in the Shakespeare Schools Festival. It is a source of great pride that, with our Year 9 production of Hamlet last academic year, we have kept this tradition alive during the pandemic. This year sees the older boys in Years 10–13 taking on the Bard.”

The play tells the story of an African general, Othello, in the 16th-century Venetian army who is tricked into suspecting his wife of adultery. Sexual jealousy and racial prejudice are among its leading motifs. In it, the sinister standard-bearer, Iago, manipulates Othello into a jealous rage, but all the while appears to warn his commander against the destructive emotion: “O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on”  – the first coinage of the term “green-eyed monster”. Other quotations from the play that have become the stuff of everyday speech include: “‘T’is neither here nor there” and “I will wear my heart upon my sleeve”.

As well as performances of Othello both at the Arts Depot and in School, the QE Shakespeare festival will include:

• The UCL Lord Northcliffe Chair of Modern English Literature, Professor John Mullan, delivering a lecture to senior pupils
• Year 8 boys in a Performing Shakespeare final, held in an X Factor-style format
• Short sonnet-based activities during form time
• A Shakespeare Treasure Hunt House competition
• Showings of National Theatre Shakespeare productions of Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale in English classes, for Years 7 and 9 respectively.

The Othello workshop began with boys learning some warm-up techniques employed in professional productions and receiving key advice on performing – tips such as: always entering and leaving the stage with a purpose and in character; using the front of the stage, and angling your body during dialogue so that you are engaging with the audience.

The pupils workshopped a section of the abridged production, with Emma Howell and QE’s resident theatre director, Gavin Malloy, then working with the cast on their positioning, movement and characterisation, in order to help build a dynamic piece.

“Emma was keen to get the boys thinking about their characters (even those without a name in the script, such as some of the soldiers learning that the war was over) – what motivates them in the scene, what their relationships were with other characters on stage, and how this could be expressed in their performances,” said Mr Bonham-Carter. “They also worked on having range in the delivery of their lines, differentiating between formal and informal speech.”

“It was a very collaborative process with which the boys seemed to be enthusiastically engaged.”

Twice postponed because of Covid-19, the 2021 School Play, an adaptation of the best-selling book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has finally been performed.

A cast drawn from Year 9 performed the play to their year group classmates in the morning and then again to parents, staff and visitors after school.

Crispin Bonham-Carter, Assistant Head (Pupil Involvement), said: “After all the disappointments surrounding the previous postponements, this was a good day, even though a couple of cast members still had to miss it because they were isolating: it was just fantastic to have live theatre taking place in the School once again, and for boys to have the opportunity to perform to an external audience.

“I pay credit to our resident Theatre Director, Gavin Malloy, for helping the boys construct such an impactful presentation of the story. Hopefully, the success of this production will inspire other pupils to get involved in drama opportunities, such as the free workshops that Mr Malloy runs.”

Based on Mark Haddon’s award-winning novel, the moving, darkly comic, and ultimately inspiring story centres on the challenges a boy with autism faces in navigating the world. It also explores themes of family breakdown and the mystery of who killed Wellington, the eponymous dog.

The performance captured the full dynamic range of the story, from the chaotic, disorientating noise and bustle of public spaces (with which the protagonist, Christopher Boon, struggles), and the outbursts of anger as the nature of the family breakdown is laid bare, to the intimate and emotional moments as Christopher’s parents try to explain what has been happening.

“All the acting performances were strong, but William Joanes, in the lead role, did a superb job, being on stage for the vast majority of the production. Appropriately for QE, his character gets an A* in A-level Maths before the play is out!” said Mr Bonham-Carter.

“The cast, technical crew and director were also brilliant, with the performance ‘in the round’ really drawing the audience into the heart of the action. The staging was particularly effective and was aided by the great work on the sound and lighting by Old Elizabethan Chris Newton, of School Stage.

“Well done all – it was worth the wait!” Mr Bonham-Carter added.

Year 11 boys had the chance to see one of their GCSE English Literature texts brought to life when they went to The Globe Theatre to watch an “exceptional production” of Romeo and Juliet.

During the visit – QE’s first live theatre visit since before the pandemic – all of Year 11 experienced a radical take on Shakespeare’s tragic tale of two young Italian ‘star-crossed lovers’ that eschewed romance in favour of an unsparing focus on mental health.

English teacher Micah King said: “I’m so glad our students got to enjoy live theatre after two years of disruption. They were able to experience an exceptional production of one of their GCSE texts, in a reproduction of the theatre it was originally performed in.

“Magic happened there: the students were simultaneously transported to Elizabethan era Verona, while the exceptional cast brought a 400-year-old play to life and made its themes modern and relevant to our 21st Century students.”

The performance, directed by the critically acclaimed young British theatre director, Ola Ince, explored the impact of emotional abuse and family feuds on the wellbeing of the eponymous lovers.

One notable addition to the Elizabethan-style architecture of the Globe Theatre was an electronic billboard at the back of the stage, displaying messages such as ‘20% of teenagers experience depression before they reach adulthood’ when Romeo is introduced ‘with [his] tears augmenting the fresh morning dew’, and “The rational part of the young person’s brain is not really developed until age 25”, displayed as Friar Lawrence marries Romeo and Juliet in secret.

Throughout the play, the boys stood in the theatre yard, or pit – the area which in Elizabethan times was the cheapest part of the theatre, with no seats provided. “This meant that sometimes the actors were moving between groups of students as they performed,” said Mr King.

The production, which stars Alfred Enoch as Romeo (best known for playing Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter film series and Wes Gibbins on the ABC legal drama television series How to Get Away with Murder) and National Youth Theatre-trained Rebekah Murrell, features modern sets and costume.

The Guardian’s reviewer, Arifa Akbar, who gave it four stars out of five, wrote: “…the love story is radically undercut and Ola Ince’s production is recalibrated to focus on Verona’s pervading social sickness and gang violence (there are not only knives but drugs and guns) as well as youth disillusionment and trauma.” She also praised the band as “the runaway highlight of this production”.

For his part, TimeOut’s Andrzej Lukowski’s said: “…I thought the billboard was an interesting idea in a mercurial show that often manages to be frustratingly dysfunctional and giddily fun at the exact same time….Essentially Ince’s desire to offer up two hours of hard-hitting social realism and two hours of wild escapist fantasy at the same time is not entirely reconcilable. Kitchen sink regietheatre* isn’t really a thing. But just because it doesn’t always ‘work’ doesn’t mean it’s not good: I loved the wild, irreverent roar of the ball [the scene in which Romeo first sees Juliet]; equally, I think Ince is on to something in choosing to earnestly highlight the number of references to suicide in the play – it seems quite reasonable to interpret the star-cross’d lovers as being depressed.”

* Definitions: Kitchen sink realism, which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, featured a type of social realism showing the harsh domestic lives of working-class British people. Regietheatre is the modern practice of allowing a director to determine how a play is put on, so that he or she need not adhere to the playwright’s specific intentions or stage directions.

Boys from Years 7–10 relished the opportunities offered to them during Enrichment Week 2021, when all four year groups were given a day off from their normal lesson timetables.

From the cerebral and scientific challenge of cryptography to the literary, emotional and rhetorical attractions of Shakespeare, the week featured a very diverse range of activities designed to be both stimulating and fun.

For Year 10, the brief was to work in groups to design and construct ‘wearable architecture’, using 6mm paper tubes.

Assistant Head (Pupil Progress) Sarah Westcott said: “The boys were asked to give consideration to form and structure. Many of the groups demonstrated good team-working skills, with some of them even managing to include moving parts.”

Year 10 were also involved in drama workshops that included performances of a heavily abridged version of Romeo and Juliet.

Year 7 enjoyed the chance to apply a little lateral thinking in an RAF cyber security challenge.  This STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) activity involved tackling a series of cryptography and coding tasks and helping a company retrieve its stolen data from cyber criminals. Working in teams of six, the boys competed against each other and against the clock, battling to be the first to unlock the stolen data.

The task helped inform them about ‘phishing’ and other techniques used by criminals to compromise their targets’ data.

Originally the day was to be led in person by RAF personnel, but because of Covid restrictions, the School managed it virtually, starting the day with a live stream through YouTube in which the boys were given an outline of their tasks and an overview of the importance of cyber security. Funded by the RAF, the event was run in collaboration with the Smallpeice Trust, an educational charity promoting careers in science and engineering to young people.

“We wanted to raise awareness of digital careers, whilst developing students’ problem-solving and research skills,” said Dr Westcott. “Students found it challenging to work to time and benefitted from the need to think creatively to solve problems whilst coordinating their team’s efforts.

“The event was intended to give an insight into the types of skills required for careers in cyber-forensics. The boys discovered that it isn’t all about coding – you must be a collaborative member of a team and keep a cool head under time pressure, too.”

In addition, Year 7 flexed their vocal cords in a singing workshop, while Years 8 and 9 took to the countryside on their respective sponsored walks.