The North Wall’s dual role as a professional arts venue and a teaching space means it makes a special contribution to the life of St Edward’s,Warden Stephen Jones tell William Crossley

STEPHEN Jones has been the Warden of St Edward’s since 2011. He is also a maths teacher, a subject he previously taught at The Dragon School in Oxford and at Radley College, where was a housemaster until being appointed to his first post as a headmaster at Dover College in Kent.

“The North Wall isn’t my baby, in the sense that it pre-dates my time here, but it’s an extraordinary venture for a school to do this. Most schools have theatres, some, if they are in towns, also have public programmes, but no other school has a theatre with a complete public programme which is so good that it has a national profile.

“It’s an arty theatre, it’s a drama theatre, it’s because it’s ours and under the school’s wing that it doesn’t have to do strictly commercial work all the time. We can put on Eddie Izzard and we sell it out, but if you just want to run a theatre, you can fill it with populist stuff – we don’t do that.

“We put on really interesting and sometimes quite edgy, dynamic and interesting types of drama and for the school that’s fantastic. It’s part of Teddies being in the city but also part of having something of real interest for our pupils.

“They’ve got a genuine theatre with proper drama that they can go to, which is programmed not so much with the school in mind but enough of the programme is aimed at things that will be of value to the school and the pupils.”

He added: “I was trying to think what an equivalent of the North Wall would be like for other departments in a school, and I suspect you couldn’t do it, but it would be a bit like running a physics department where you had alongside it a research institute for astronomy – how cool that would be and how exciting for the physicists in a school?”

Like the North Wall’s outgoing director, Lucy Maycock, Mr Jones is proud of the North Wall’s ArtsLab outreach programme, helping people from a range of backgrounds to get a start in the world of professional drama as writers, performers and technicians.

He said: “ArtsLab offers places to young people to come and get engaged with drama and for a lot of them that gets their career off the ground. We do that as a totally charitable venture. They live here during the programme, get board and lodging and work on their craft.”

Just across South Parade from the North Wall, St Edward’s new £7m Ogston Music School is a demonstration of the school’s continuing commitment to the creative arts and has the potential to offer a further performance space to extend the North Wall programme, according to Mr Jones.

He said: “The recital room will probably seat 100 or so people for a small ensemble performance and may be absolutely ideal for the North Wall’s public programme of music.

“It’s a really nice venue but at the moment we don’t know how much use the school will make of the space, so we’re going to run the building purely as a music school for a year and then see how much freedom it has for engaging with the North Wall’s programme.”

He is looking forward to seeing how the North Wall develops over coming decades: “With the 10th anniversary approaching, we undertook a review of pupils and staff, focusing particularly on how the North Wall is used by the drama department and the value they get from being able to see serious drama here. This will help us to tweak it, see how we can improve what we have been doing and see that it does well for another 10, 20, 30 years.”