July 2021

Below are updates of work we are currently engaged in;

for more details, do drop us an email.

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Alt-Shakes Workshops

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On the back of the experience we've gleaned on our journey to date,

we are excited to announce a new training opportunity!

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These Zoom sessions have been running weekly since April 2020.

Out of this has come a staged new piece of AlternativeShakespeare,

Romeo & Juliet: The Confessions featuring 3 actors who

have attended these Zoom sessions.

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Another play, Lady Macbeth (alone) is currently being workshopped.

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​This is what we're going to do:

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​Work together to understand how Shakespeare

might have created his Theatre by working collaboratively.

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Take the existing Shakespeare plays and apply

the AlternativeTheatre methods.

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Isolate his characters, themes, speeches, lines,

scenes etc from their original setting​.

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Workshop the text in new ways via Zoom to discover

how it works and bring it to theatrical life.

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Recreate new Shakespeare work out of old Shakespeare plays.

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Bring our own experiences of the world

to enrich our creative process.

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The Workshops are for . . .

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People who want to work collaboratively to push the

limits of their Theatre skills and development.

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Actors who want to immerse themselves in the fun and

excitement of bringing Shakespeare's words to life.

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Workshopping alternative ways of presenting classical Theatre

to resonate with today's world around us.

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Creating new plays for stage performances,

books, audio pieces, videos etc.

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Providing workshop and performance material for our

AlternativeShakespeare podcasts (launching this year).​

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If you're interested in finding out more, please click here.

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Unfinished Shakespeare

Carrying on the living tradition of this thing we all call Shakespeare

 

"I, Shakespeare"

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The third part of the Trilogy comprising three works:

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Time After Time - the play written and performed in 2003

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Shakespeare's Dream - the book published in 2019

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I, Shakespeare - a book currently being written in 2021

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Shakespeare's Bones

new plays and books giving new and

sustainable life to Shakespeare’s work

 

Queen Gertrude: the killing thereof

This will be the 9th new play that attempts to find new discoveries about Shakespeare’s plays and how they were written. This one-woman piece is inspired by Janet Adelman’s seminal book Suffocating Mothers; in it, Queen Gertrude is finally allowed to tell her side of the famous story.

 

Workshops have been completed, and a draft of the play is now in place.

 

King Lear (alone)

Over the last few months, our new play King Lear (alone) has been performed in venues in Birmingham, Manchester, Bath, Bristol, Oldham, Edinburgh, Buxton and London. This one-man play revisits the words and themes of the Shakespeare original solely from the perspective of Lear himself. By dispensing with the other 28 characters, the audience is allowed a unique insight into his feelings and thoughts.

 

Feedback from the audience and reviewers has been extremely positive, and we are now looking at how the piece can be performed in audio and video.

 

For more details, please click here. 

 

Shakespeare's Dream

The starting point for our work was the performance of a newly written play Time After Time.

 

Whilst the piece is clearly a homage to the work of Shakespeare, nevertheless its major impetus and thrusts were to explore the nature of his creativity and to see Shakespeare in the context of being a part of a theatrical continuum. In the play, this continuum, or tradition, starts by actively being grounded in the work and times of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but in the second half Shakespeare is catapulted into the 20th Century, to encounter some of the major theatre creations his work helped bring about.

 

The play has now been rewritten as a book, and is on sale in Amazon.

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We are currently workshopping the piece ready for broadcast in 2021.

  

Unfinished Shakespeare

focusing on how Shakespeare can help

us understand what it is to be Human

 

Discussion Paper 

This is currently being written and will be made available in the coming months.

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