This Theatre in Education Project uses drama to engage young people in the global movement against continuing high levels of men’s violence against women and girls. Emphasising the critical importance of primary prevention and attitudinal change, the plays in the project target the continuing salience of culturally mandated excuses for hurting and killing women — she was unfaithful, she disobeyed. The first play in a planned trilogy, Othello on Trial (or the Tragedy of Desdemona, the Wife), utilises Shakespeare’s Othello, read as an uncannily timely play, in order to dramatise the cultural questions raised by the high number of women killed by male partners and former partners today (one woman is killed each week on average by a male partner or former partner in Australia, two a week in England and Wales).
Othello on Trial has been performed and developed in Melbourne, Australia and London, UK. It was first performed in Australia at La Mama Courthouse Theatre in partnership with Fitzroy Leal Service in 2015-16. The 2016 performances at La Mama were supported by grants from Melbourne University, the Law Foundation and by a generous $10,000 grant from a Victorian Women’s Trust donor.
Performances in London have been supported by Queen Mary University of London in 2015, by Birkbeck University Law School in 2018 and by a law firm and NGO in London.
In 2020 Dr Kathryn Coleman, Dr Adrian Howe, Dr Sarah Healy, Dr Richard Sallis and Ana Ward Davies obtained an internal Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Research Initiative (CAWRI) grant to develop the project in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at Melbourne University. Delayed due to Covid, the implementation of this grant in 2021 will help support a performance and, more importantly, a filming of the performance to enable further development of the project in Victorian secondary schools.
Key questions arising at this stage of the project’s development
- What research practices in creativity and wellbeing can enable early career educators to cultivate critical gender and race literacies in the classroom?
- How does the performative nature of a theatre-led arts integration project allow young people to engage with the pressing issue of violence against women?
Teacher candidates and early career teachers will be invited to assess Othello on Trial as a school-based curricula intervention that can support student creativity, critical thinking and sense of well-being, trouble ethical societal issues and cultivate critical literacies that pertain to race and gender.
The overall goal of the project remains that of developing and educational recourse that contributes to substantial change around violence against women, focusing on excuses and legal defences for intimate partner femicide.
We are very grateful that the Victorian Women’s Trust has once again generously offered to provide additional funds to support this important project.