Professor Tom Bishop will be sharing his Shakespearean expertise at a special two-hour seminar inside the recently built Pop-up Globe in March.
Tom has been thinking about, acting in and studying Shakespeare since his high school days, and has made a long and successful academic career out of his love of the Bard’s work.
His first encounter with Shakespeare’s compelling theatrical power was Peter Brook’s famous staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he saw at the age of 12 when its world tour arrived in Melbourne.
The Pop-up Globe has been built in central Auckland to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare and to host a season of some of his best known plays throughout February and March. It is the first ever full-scale temporary working replica of this second Globe theatre to be built.
Tom’s seminar, 'Shakespeare on Stage: Performance and Posterity Inside the Globe Theatre', will provide a unique insight into the world of Shakespeare and his plays.
The first half of this session will explore the extraordinary structure of the Globe and what it tells us about the way Shakespeare’s plays work. A group of actors will then join the second half of the session and perform some scene demonstrations including some scratch scenes using cue-scripts improvised to by members of the audience.
Tom says having the Pop-Up Globe in Auckland has been an asset to the public and scholars alike.
“Working on this year’s AUSA Summer Shakespeare production of The Tempest — at the Pop-up Globe from March 1 to March 13 — has been an invaluable opportunity to explore a theatre space approximating an early English stage."
Tom is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996), the translator of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003), and the co-editor of the annual Shakespearean International Yearbook. He is currently working on a book on Shakespeare’s theatre games.
The seminar is on Thursday 10 March from 10am-12pm.
You can register here.
