Shakespeare’s work is full of memorable scenes, great characters and has challenged performers and directors for several hundred years.
There are plenty of challenges involved, but also huge rewards. It’s great stuff, but can seem intimidating: there have been rather narrow and restrictive ideas about how it should be done. The language, though amazing, can be difficult and hard to make sense of; sometimes it’s not well taught at school and people are put off. We will work hard to dispel all these preconceptions!
The Course
Acting Shakespeare is an eight-week course exploring the work of Shakespeare: language, character, staging, dialogue, and much more. The course will explore Shakespeare’s work from different angles with a view to enjoying the enormous power and range of his work and the opportunities it offers to performers.
The work will involve all sorts of different approaches and will include work on movement, voice and character. We will be looking at dialogues from several different plays, covering comedy and tragedy. We will also be working with solo texts chosen by the participants. We will be stressing the importance of taking artistic risks, having fun, keeping an open mind and having an adventurous and collaborative attitude.
Above all we would want to stress that Shakespeare can be explored and acted by everybody, regardless of background or previous experience. We think anybody who engages with the work can perform effectively and can get a great deal of pleasure out of doing so. And we think we can prove it.
We hope you can join us for this enjoyable and stimulating course.
in situ: and Shakespeare
in situ: has performed a number of Shakespeare’s plays over the past 16 years, in a variety of different environments.
We began with The Macbeth Project – a terrifying production of Macbeth taking place in a private house – and have since performed King Lear in an iron-age fort and The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night in a medieval church.
Most recently, we presented a spine-tingling production of Hamlet with influences as divergent as Japanese Butoh dance and 20th Century spy fiction.