Drama: Plays & Players
Learn online or in London

This course explores how Shakespeare’s plays have been reimagined over the centuries. We will consider what adapted versions reveal about attitudes to Shakespeare at the time of their production and the challenges that come with transforming the plays into different media. We also engage with the question of how far adaptations preserve or challenge Shakespeare’s iconic status.

Take a fresh look at Shakespeare, exploring The Comedy of Errors and The Winter's Tale in the company of an experienced theatre director. With performance in mind, we will examine the language of the two plays and discuss how Shakespeare’s use of verse evolves over the course of his career.

Reflecting on the 1916 Easter Rising, W.B. Yeats speculated: “Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” The Irish political revolution is unique in being preceded by a literary revolution, most especially on the Irish stage, which hugely influenced the generation of politicians and thinkers that went on to shape modern Ireland. In this course we will trace developments in Irish drama throughout the 20th century, from the Irish Literary Revival to experiments from groups such as the Field Day Theatre Company, reading plays by writers including Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, Seán O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, and Marina Carr.

We will read and discuss three classic plays: Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Focusing closely on structure, language and tone, we will consider how dramatists across time have explored themes such as sexual politics, family relationships and state power through their plays, as well as considering the social, cultural and historical contexts in which they were produced.

Take a fresh look at Shakespeare, exploring selected plays in the company of an experienced theatre director. With performance in mind, we will examine the language of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night,



and discuss how Shakespeare’s use of verse evolves over the course of his career.

Shakespeare presents us with two visions of marriage, the Macbeths’ longstanding but filled with passion and rivalry, Othello’s fragile and still largely innocent. Macbeth and his wife know each other only too well – Othello and Desdemona barely at all. We the audience become sucked into these marital dramas through the force of Shakespeare’s dazzling imagery, psychological insight and sensational plotting. We’ll be studying the characters, the poetry and the ideas of both plays in detail.

This course will explore the concerns, styles and influences of four dramatic texts from the 20th and 21st centuries and how they reflect the social, political and cultural conditions in which they were written. It focuses primarily on G.B. Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, and Lucy Prebble’s Enron, making multiple connections between them as the course progresses.