Unpacking Shakespeare

Theatre does not do well as a museum piece. Its transitory nature insists it be relevant to us in a most immediate way. If we are to still engage with works of art from a time so different to our own, we must remove their dust sheets, clean them up, re-imagine them and re-present them. Shakespeare’s plays, with their unfamiliar language, length and alienating social settings, provide a challenge for anyone in arts education seeking to align their work with the curriculum. As a director and educator, with nearly 20 years’ experience of creating work with and for young people, I have continually had to develop my approach to classic texts, both in performance and workshops.
I have just directed ‘Twelfth Night’, and am running workshops with Year 8s (12–13 year-olds) alongside the production. Plays are written to be performed or viewed, so the work is active, with students making discoveries when they get a scene on its feet and have to make physical choices. They are right at the start of their relationship with Shakespeare’s work, so it’s a responsibility, but also a delight to see them laugh and light up with recognition at the characters, story, and themes of bullying, revenge and unrequited love in what to me feels the most contemporary of Shakespeare’s plays.
When I took up post at York Theatre Royal, I inherited an exemplary education programme called Partnership in Education and Theatre (PET), a joint initiative with City of York Council Arts Education. The scheme forges year-long partnerships with local schools, primary and secondary, and uses the theatre building, its staff and productions to facilitate creative learning across all the curriculum subjects. When Artistic Director, Damian Cruden, directed ‘Macbeth’, we worked with science students to examine whether modern forensic techniques would have incriminated Macbeth. North Yorkshire Police CSI officers and actors from the production led workshops, with students looking at fingerprinting, footprint markings and fibre data, and cross-examining the suspects. Each group of students then used their evidence to present their solution to the murder. We often use the plays for Key Stage 2 History – they provide an excellent starting point to understanding life in the Age of Exploration. Students listen to descriptions of life in a port town and then create their own scenes with roles, status, diverse languages and exotic merchandise. We live in such a different world to the Elizabethans on the surface, yet I firmly believe that Shakespeare’s plays are for everyone and for all time as they deal so acutely with what it means to be human. The rhythm of the verse is such a natural form of expression and the language can be immensely freeing for young people, enabling them to articulate a greater depth of thought and feeling.

In our less formal learning environments, such as our 300-strong youth theatre, Shakespeare also has a significant place. Last year during York’s Literature Festival, 14–16 year-olds performed ‘The Tempest and Other Tales of the Sea’ – Shakespeare sat alongside eye-witness accounts from sixteenth century adventurers, ‘The Voyage of Maeldun’ and the young people’s own stories. Last month, 36 of our 16+ group took to the main stage with a rollicking adaptation of ‘Pericles’ – next year it will be our 5–7 year-olds. The earlier we start to play with Shakespeare, the less scary he seems.
And playfulness is key. A re-working of ‘The Tempest’ I directed with Winchester Theatre Royal and Big Wooden Horse made significant use of puppetry and shadow projection. It had a ‘Lost’-like atmosphere with a crashed aeroplane, burst suitcases, wreckage strewn across the stage – but no survivors. Instead all the action was a working-out of the desires and frustrations of the island’s inhabitants: Caliban creates a junk god out of flotsam and jetsam; Miranda makes her ideal man; and Prospero wreaks revenge on shadows on his cell wall. It was highly visual and proved an ideal first Shakespeare for primary schools, not through any process of dumbing down, but by accentuating the key theme: without convenient victims, without magical powers, could Prospero still forgive and become fully human?
Contrastingly, last autumn I directed a complex new verse play, ‘Beyond Measure’ by Bridget Foreman, which picks up the journey of Isabella where ‘Measure for Measure’ ends. The one-woman multi-media show (performed by Rina Mahoney) used Isabella’s situation to explore present-day attitudes to the balance of power between the sexes, asking how far we have really come in 400 years. It was revelatory to see our studio full of twenty-first century young women identifying with the dilemmas of a sixteenth century nun.
However you like to unpack – carefully or chaotically, all at once or piece by piece – an undue hesitancy to disturb the contents may mean you never discover what is hidden within.