Your cart is empty.
Shakespeare on the Factory Floor - A Handbook for Actors, Directors and Designers

Shakespeare on the Factory Floor

A Handbook for Actors, Directors and Designers

By Andrew Hilton
Imprint: Nick Hern Books
Paperback : 9781848428935, 288 pages, April 2022

Description

A passionate, illuminating exploration of Shakespeare's greatest plays and characters, by the director of acclaimed theatre company Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory.

Combining close textual analysis with practical insights based on his extensive experience of directing Shakespeare's plays, Andrew Hilton delves into a fascinating range of topics such as emotional truth in the comedies, the importance of the plays' social dynamics, the choice of settings and periods, making and withholding moral judgements, working with different versions of the texts, and even adapting them.

Throughout, Hilton urges us as audiences and theatre-makers to set aside our preconceived notions, and instead to approach Shakespeare's plays with an open mind, moment by moment, so that we can connect with them in fresh and vital ways.

Reviews

"Andrew Hilton's Tobacco Factory Shakespeares were an inspiration... What audiences saw and heard was not a display but an uncovering. His productions did not add to the drama: they revealed it... In Shakespeare on the Factory Floor, Hilton has once again lit up Shakespeare: lucid and penetrating on the page and on the stage."

- Susannah Clapp, theatre critic of the Observer

"What an illuminating book this is… a wonderful starting point for practitioners: a stripping back of superfluous assumptions to the core structures of character and word."

- British Theatre Guide