On February 20, King’s Academy presented its fourth annual Shakespeare Monologue Competition, which proved to be the largest competition yet. This year, 54 students took to the stage, including three visiting Round Square exchange students.  

“It was exciting to see so many students sign up,” said theater teacher Meghna Gandhi, “particularly as the large majority aren’t performers or taking theater classes and actually saw it through.”  

The competitors were committed to honing their oratory skills, with many signing up for extra rehearsals with Gandhi, and many practicing alone or with friends. “There was a real buzz around performance week, I was hearing from English teachers and dorm parents how students were rehearsing in the dorms in the evenings,” said Gandhi, who earned, alongside her performers, the nickname “The Shakespeare Brigade.”

“The quality of the performances was great,” said Gandhi, who held an afternoon and an evening session for the competition to accommodate all the performers. “I really would like the event to be that one space every year where non-performers can commit a small amount of time and take the risk and have the courage to show up on stage solo and do something really brave.”

According to Dr. Mary Wall, head of the Department of Communication, Rhetoric and the Literary Arts (CRLA) – English, through the performances the audience was witness to a “range of human emotion and experience, from Othello’s despair to Caliban’s anger to Puck’s playfulness.”

“We watched entranced as the performers gave voice to equivocations, self-justifications and declarations,” said Wall. “As they ‘strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage,’ they captured the essence of Shakespeare’s language with finesse and depth of feeling.”

It was no easy feat, she added. “They tried to make sense of the human experience in the Bard’s powerful but often foreign-sounding language – through his complex witticisms, metaphors and tonal shifts. The one emotion that ran through every performance was courage. It took bravery in the face of vulnerability to get up on stage — alone — to get into character and to embrace Shakespeare’s language.”

Students selected an impressive range of pieces and characters to perform on stage, where they demonstrated their powerful wielding of language, clever manipulation of rhetoric, and energetic art of oration.

“‘All the world's a stage,’ and during the Shakespeare Monologue Competition, our actors at King’s truly ‘played many parts,’ each with remarkable skill and conviction,” said Wall. Congratulations to the winners, and to all the competitors!

1^st place: (Grade 11 and 12) Caleb Jackman ’24 (Othello, Othello) and Suleiman Al Khayyat ’25 (Romeo, Romeo and Juliet); (Grade 9 and 10) Uwase Ange ’26 (Ariel, The Tempest)

2^nd place: (Grade 11 and 12) Saja Aggad ’24 (Constance, King John); (Grade 9 and 10) Leda O’Rourke ’27 (Puck, A Midsummer’s Night Dream)

3^rd place: (Grade 11 and 12) Raya Gupta ’25 (Juliet, Romeo and Juliet); (Grade 9 and 10) Isaac Jackman ’26 (Iago, Othello)

Honorable Mentions:
(Grade 9) Lubna Sabbagh ’27 and Mufleh Akel ’27; (Grade 10) Haya AbuNaji ’26; (Grade 11) Noredin AlSaidah ’25, Razan AlAli ’25 and Wadha AlJasem ’25; (Grade 12) Yinzhe Liu ’24