Drama Literature Courses

Shakespeare's tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear, are perhaps his two greatest plays. One dramatizes the urgent, agonised questioning of youth, the other a terrifying slide into powerlessness and despair that attends an aging, autocratic king. In both plays the young and the old are drawn into fatal conflict with each other: “Crabbed Age and Youth cannot live together.”  The young Prince Hamlet finds himself adrift amid the plotting and hypocrisy of the older generation in the royal court of Elsinore. The old King Lear is outwitted and finally discarded by his own children. Both these tragic heroes are forced into a journey which leads them to question the very purpose of existence itself. That anguish is realised in perhaps the most powerful dramatic poetry that Shakespeare ever wrote.

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 and themes of two plays, watch and compare clips of stage productions and discuss the extraordinary variety to be found in Shakespeare’s work.

Spend a day exploring The Children, a naturalistic and funny play that tackles serious themes as it charts an encounter between three retired nuclear scientists. Leading playwright, Lucy Kirkwood, received a Writers Guild Best Play Award for The Children, which premiered Downstairs at the Royal Court Theatre in 2016, followed by a run on Broadway in 2017, and was revived at Nottingham Playhouse in 2024.

This course covers the thematic concerns, dramatic styles and contextual influences of three plays from the 20th and 21st centuries: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), David Hare’s The Judas Kiss (1998) and Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat (2015). Drawing on the plays’ production histories, it considers how dramatists and theatre practitioners have represented the social, cultural and political worlds of specific times and places.

Join us to explore three of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. We will consider how these plays explore questions of power, ambition, authority, and revenge; youth and old age; memory, grief, regret and madness; family, gender and sexuality.