SCENE 37 EXT. THE GARDEN - MORNING Will works on his garden. Now digging, cutting turf, gardening is hard. Anne emerges. ANNE: Husband! It’s Sunday. WILL: Sunday? ANNE: This isn’t London. If you miss church here they fine you. Will Shakespeare’s London was run strictly both by the laws of the City (most of which the playhouses evaded by mostly being outside the City limits), the laws of the land and the laws of the church. Put all these together at a time when religious obser

If there were indeed no rehearsal, how might Shakespeare’s first actors have done it? It seems inconceivable in this modern, post-Stanislavski world that actors could have produced coherent, engaging performances with fully realised characters without  the rehearsal process understood and expected today. Yet the modern, radical technique of “Cue Script” acting created by Patrick Tucker in the 1980s, and perpetuated in the UK and USA today, certainly does  work. So how does th

Since I was a Lower Sixth student studying Richard III, two things have been very clear to me: first, I love Shakespeare’s plays, and...

An abiding memory from Once-upon-a-drama-school, long, long ago, is of a fellow student’s comic impressions of the school’s principal....

They say a director makes up their mind about you within 30 seconds of walking in the door. This is the fun of the actor’s game: you need...

If music be the food of love, you might have some kind of Synaesthesia going on, there. It seems there are about 80 different types of...

I recently discovered a very fascinating article that changed everything about Shakespeare for me. It was a transcript from a 2016...

When did slickness become the keyword in Shakespeare (and other theatrical) reviews? Much rehearsal-room time and energy are given to...

Once upon a not-so-very long, L-O-N-G ago, together with a small band of fellow teachers-in-training, I was beckoned into a tutorial with...

Earlier today I sat down at my London desk firmly determined to finally write an intelligent article about how to perform Shakespeare...

Tamara Ritthaler, one of our finest actors and educators, has written some reflections on her 2020 . Check out her blog post here:...

So, that’s our question: What shakes your spear? We’ve decided to start this blog page to get our personal and collective spears shaking....