Workshops

Haman and Hot Potatoes: staging the story of Esther in 2025

Leaders: Perry Mills (Edward’s Boys) and Elisabeth Dutton (University of Fribourg)

Staging the Enterlude of the Godly Queen Hester and a newly-written purim play has presented numerous challenges, and we have learned a lot, and laughed a lot, too – and occasionally cried.  In this session we will reflect on specific aspects of the performance: complex verse forms; archaic diction; traverse staging and the ’traverse’ throne; stage directions – and their conspicuous absence. And some of the broader issues that we couldn’t address simply through hard work and rehearsal: for example, our anxieties about writing and performing in a Jewish tradition when most of the company are not Jewish; and institutional fears about a narrative that features Jews and Persians being presented in the current political climate.    

The session will be interactive, drawing on questions and comments from all present. We may even include a little light rehearsal, should delegates be willing to pretend to be teenage boys. 

"My very walk should be a jig": Empowering Students with Impromptu Shakespeare

Leaders: Ronan Hatfull (University of Warwick), Rebecca Marie MacMillan and Tom Wilkinson (Impromptu Shakespeare)

This educational workshop introduces participants to teaching Shakespeare through improvisation, empowering students within the creative process. Based on a collaboration between Dr Ronan Hatfull and Impromptu Shakespeare members Rebecca Macmillan and Tom Wilkinson, this workshop draws from their experience co-leading sessions at the University of Warwick and NYU London over the past three years. Impromptu Shakespeare creates improvised “new” Shakespeare plays, inspired by audience suggestions and elements from the playwright’s canon. The session begins with a demonstration in the style of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, featuring Ronan chairing improvised Shakespearean scenarios performed by Rebecca and Tom. Participants will then engage in an interactive workshop starting with an iambic pentameter warm-up, illustrating how linguistic structures shape improvised scenes. Rebecca will guide participants in using similes to craft spontaneous scenarios, while Ronan introduces the ‘Shakespop’ game, blending contemporary lyrics with Shakespearean style. Tom will lead the ‘St Swithin’s Day’ game to help participants construct improvised conversations. The workshop concludes with ‘Drop the Book,’ where participants select a random Shakespeare passage, begin reading, and improvise the rest. This session will appeal to actors, educators, and academics seeking innovative approaches to student engagement and performance.

Augmenting Shakespeare: Queering Queen Mab

Leader: Emily Snyder (University of Birmingham) 

David Garrick famously rewrote Romeo and Juliet, augmenting the text with his own words.  Recently, Jeanie O’Hare premiered Queen Margaret at the Globe, linking Shakespeare’s history plays with new speech.  This workshop will focus on augmentation through soliloquy: offering alternative speeches for Shakespeare’s characters which may blend seamlessly (or not) into a performance of Shakespeare’s text.  Participants will explore new speeches for Mercutio, Hero, Bertram and others, with opportunity for discussion about the possibilities of augmentation in performances for the 21st-century stage.

To express interest, please indicate at registration or email the conference team (british.shakespeare.conference[@]gmail.com) with the subject heading “BSA Workshop.”

Sounding Shakespeare

Leader: Andrea Smith (University of Suffolk)

In this hands-on workshop, gain an insight into the world of sound production for radio Shakespeare. Learn how sound effects are created, and the impact they can have on mood, atmosphere and storytelling.

Places on each session are limited, but the session will run multiple times as demand requires.

Ruffians

Leader: Rob Myles (director)

Double Falsehood Doubled: Exploring New Horizons in Pedagogy and Practice

Leader: Melissa Merchant (Murdoch University)

How can we continue to reinvigorate Shakespeare’s texts dramaturgically and scenographically while remaining historically grounded? This interactive workshop invites participants to explore the pedagogical and creative potential of Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood or, The Distressed Lovers (1727). Purportedly Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost play The History of Cardenio (1612–1613), the play was controversially included in the Third Series of the Arden Shakespeare’s Complete Works (from 2010). Since its premiere at Drury Lane on December 13, 1727 Double Falsehood has been both further adapted and ‘unadaptated’, seeking to reverse Theobald’s alterations (most recently, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017). This workshop will explore the concept of “doubles” across contested and dual authorship, adaptation versus unadaptation, and dramaturgical and scenographic possibilities.

Participants will consider how “doubling" the play's characters could reduce actor roles for cost-effectiveness while amplifying the thematic echoes of the paired lovers. Both pedagogical and practice-based opportunities for readaptation will be investigated alongside both historical and emergent staging techniques. Incorporating script reading, analysis, dramaturgy and design, this workshop will explore Double Falsehood as a dynamic, adaptable work with practical tools for reinvigorating the canon through creative experimentation.

Shakespeare and Role-Playing... in Games: Learning About Shakespeare Through Games as Performance

Convenor: Jane Raisch (University of York) and Dave Harper (University of York)

In this interactive role-playing game experience, the facilitators will lead a brief role-playing game session focused on the history of Shakespearean performance in York. No experience of role-playing games is required, and participants will be able to engage in a fun and educational game centred around how the techniques of gaming and play-acting can inform learning about performance history. All materials needed will be provided and rules and game-play will be explained in the workshop. Auditors are also very welcome!

The session's objectives will be to examine how game-playing allows for a different experience of performance - one entirely extemporal - to inform education about dramatic history. Game-playing has been increasingly seen as interactive and dynamic tool for creating immersive, hands-on engagement with historical periods. This workshop would involve research-by-doing, a sort of informal laboratory if you like, in which we will play and discuss the experience of playing, explore what we can learn from this kinds of hands-on activity, how this might be implemented in the classroom or its role in larger, local heritage initiatives.

Please note that this workshop occupies a double slot.

Diagrammatic Shakespeare

Leader: Steve Purcell (University of Warwick)

Directing Table Top Shakespeare in 2016, Tim Etchells described his approach as "diagrammatic". His performers narrated the stories of Shakespeare’s plays using household objects, arranging the objects on a table so as to emphasise groupings of characters, regroupings, parallels and oppositions. The approach allowed for an unusual level of clarity in the storytelling, bringing out patterns and dynamics that are often obscured in more conventional performances. Working with the professional cast of The Pantaloons theatre company’s 2025 production of Hamlet, this workshop will explore what happens to key scenes from the play when live actors take a similarly ‘diagrammatic’ approach. The workshop will bring Etchells’ idea into play with notions of acting as form of game, drawing especially on the techniques of physical theatre practitioners Marcello Magni and John Wright. What happens when we try to express the dynamic between characters in physical actions? How might such an ‘outside-in’ approach to blocking – rather than the now-standard Stanislavskian ‘inside-out’ approach – help to release different sorts of meanings?

Macbeth VR Experience

Leader: Peter Kuling (University of Guelph)

Macbeth VR Experience, developed in early 2022 and released for free to educational institutions across Ontario, Canada in May 2024, re-imagines the haunting atmosphere, characters, and visuals of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a fully immersive, 360-degree VR experience. This 25 minute VR adaptation allows participants to embody one of the three witches, becoming part of Shakespeare’s Scotland from an entirely interactive, first-person perspective. 

This all-new interactive experience allows players to physically and virtually “step into” scenes from Macbeth, fostering unique approaches to both teaching and studying early modern texts. It combines traditional dramaturgy with contemporary digital storytelling methods from video games and cinema. From a technical perspective, Macbeth VR Experience is among the first fully immersive digital adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, utilizing motion capture, digital avatars, and elaborate environments created from satellite and drone-captured imagery, rather than simply using 360-degree filmed footage of a stage play. Developed in partnership with Simwave VR in Ottawa, Macbeth VR Experience also benefits from full voice-over performances by actors from Canada’s Stratford Festival. The project includes sound effects, musical scoring, and interactive elements that make each play-through unique.

"Playing up in school": Rhetorical Practice in Speech, Gesture, Movement, and Space

Leader: Gary Watt (University of Warwick)

This workshop is interested in the rhetorical figures and sound effects of Shakespearean speech, and how speech can work persuasively with gestural action, movement, and stage space to convey meaning. Through active engagement, participants can experiment with combinations of voice, gesture, and movement. Insights from rhetorical practice inform Shakespearean scholarship, including my books Shakespeare’s Acts of Will (Arden Shakespeare, 2016) and Shakespeare and the Law (Oxford Shakespeare Topics, 2024). My hope is to recover in modern teaching some of the inherently dramatic, even playful, rhetorical exercises that in Shakespeare’s schoolroom laid the foundation for performances in early modern theatre, law, and public life. 

Shakespeare's Rivals

Leader: Michael Cordner and Ollie Jones (University of York)

To Breathe or Not to Breathe 

Leader: Bryn Holding (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)

My interdisciplinary research seeks to reposition breath’s value in twenty-first century Shakespearean performance practice. Combining historical scholarship, practice-led research and the latest in respiratory physiology I aim to ignite a fresh dialogue between the art and science of acting. My research seeks to unearth the physiological and semiotic impact a conscious awareness of inhalation, exhalation and breath suspension can have on the contemporary performance of Shakespeare.

The objectives of the workshop are to:

- Analyse the multifarious ways in which breath placement impacts the performance of Shakespeare for actor and audience.

- To highlight how breath placement creates a new text in and of itself.

- To reveal the creative potency of breath as a physiological and semiotic tool in performance.

- To gain audience reception, perception, feedback and reflections on the work as my research develops.

Using Hamlet's iconic soliloquy as the focus text for the session - I will unpick how where an actor chooses to breathe impacts our perception of their 'Hamlet'. What narratives do the respiratory choices create? The session will begin with me contextualising my research practice - unveiling the interdisciplinary laboratory work to date - before moving to the focus of the session which is a live practical exploration/demonstration of the relationship between breath, text and audience.