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ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE
The NorthWall: Iqbal Khan
By Lucy Maycock, Artistic Director
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
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!
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!
Pastoral Leaders
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.
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.