Shakespeare Through Stanislavski: Creating an Accessible Toolkit for Performing Shakespeare

In the United Kingdom, current approaches to teaching learners to perform Shakespeare have faced criticism and calls for reform due to their reliance on verbal reasoning. At present the dominant approaches in Further and Higher Education engage learners in extensive textual analysis as the primary means of encountering the text. This later progresses to the development of character and performance based on learners understanding of the text’s rhythm, form, structure and literary devises such as metaphor and simile. These text-first approaches to performing Shakespeare can create accessibility issues for learners, especially those from non-academic backgrounds. Through my Practice as Research, I have developed The Shakespeare Toolkit, a new and accessible pedagogy for engaging with Shakespeare’s plays rooted in a practice first, character-driven approach to developing performances which meet the demands of the verse drama.

To address the inherent issues in text-first approaches to working with Shakespeare’s plays, this Practice as Research PhD study adapts and combines aspects of Stanislavski’s ‘system’ with Elizabethan acting practices and First Folio technique to create a novel, practice first approach to performing – and understanding – Shakespeare’s text. This was achieved through the development, application, and refinement of twenty exercises, or ‘tools’, to approach and interpret Shakespeare’s plays by means of a character-driven, practice-centric methodology – The Shakespeare Toolkit. These tools can be used holistically in succession as a complete ‘toolkit’ in order to stage a production of Shakespeare’s text with actors and/or acting students or can be individually incorporated with other practices.

This research will provide those facilitating acting classes or directing Shakespeare in the United Kingdom with a new means of approaching the plays through practice and character. In doing so, creating a more accessible means for learners and professional actors to engage with Shakespeare’s writing performatively.