The Theatre morphed into a mossy then rocky and barren land for this year’s Remove Play, ‘Where the World Ends’, written and directed by Miss Felix. With a remote uninhabitable island off the coast of Scotland as a setting, voices of the cast were fine-tuned in exchange for accents further north than Radleians may be able to mark on a map. The play was largely a tragic tale, told in sizeable amounts of tweed, with the dynamics of a stricken group of boys and adults captured well. The chirpy and impressionable young men, as time continued, became irritable towards their adult figures, including the Minister who looked to control the cohort through the promise of gifting fire. Such quarrels over who was to light the fire – reducing the group to primitive instincts – served as a precursor to fatal divisions within the group. The cast were expert in showing what it’s like to be left behind from families, and friends – least of all the outside world.
Though on first glance the requisite ingredients for a promising school trip, the ratio of men to Scottish youths lent itself to a mixture of quick-spreading disease, and even forced amputation, in the face of hypothermia. A mid-point visible costume change made the change of situation that the group were experiencing more explicit – blood-stained fronts, and torn shirts. When it was decided it would be wise for a raft to be built or signal to be used to return home, none could help the stranded boys. Though handy tools to enable a crossing back to St Kilda, such ideas did not remedy the perilous situation, and their only hope of returning was ripped from their hands as the Minister commandeered the single raft to return to the mainland on his own. The cast of Removes mustered a captivating and poignant performance in Where the World Ends.
Gabriel L, E Social
View the photographs here.
