During 2016, the RSC ran a huge range of school events to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, offering a host of resources, workshops, talks and broadcasts to make Shakespeare “vivid, accessible and enjoyable” for pupils and their teachers.
This work will continue in 2017, with the RSC determined to make the most of the on-going relationships it has built with schools. The company already works with around 1,800 secondary and primary schools every year, prioritising schools in areas of socio-economic disadvantage.
The RSC’s new initiatives include a series of 13 short films aimed at key stage 3 and 4 students. Called The Text Detectives, the series aims to “demystify” Shakespeare’s texts for secondary pupils and will be launched early next year.
Five of the films, for instance, will feature leading RSC actors. Stars like Paapa Essiedu, who recently starred in Hamlet, will define key terms used in the study and performance of Shakespeare’s work – such as antithesis, iambic pentameter, soliloquy and rhyming couplets.
“Our objective is to show how we work with these different terms and what they mean for working actors and directors – so the terms become very straightforward and tangible,” explained Jacqui O’Hanlon, the RSC’s director of education.
Four of the films will help youngsters to develop the close text reading skills they need for exams and another four will take key scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and explore the different ways in which actors and directors interpret them.
The RSC will also be running a new conference series for 16 to 19-year-olds in April and May next year. Entitled For the Good of Rome, the conferences are linked to the RSC’s forthcoming Rome season, when the company will stage “four of Shakespeare’s most political and bloody thrillers” – Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus.
“We want to use the Rome plays to have a national conversation with young people in education, in our schools and in our universities, about some of the questions at the heart of the plays,” Ms O’Hanlon continued.
Each conference will explore a question relating to the four plays, all of which are pertinent today. The questions include:
- “Is politics inherently unfair in a system where the few always have power over the many?”
- “Does the art of rhetoric have any place or power in modern politics?”
- “Are female leaders and figureheads judged by different standards to their male counterparts?”
Ms O’Hanlon is convinced that the Rome season of plays will highlight “Shakespeare’s relevance to the world we live in”. She is also adamant that new projects like these, as well as the RSC’s teacher CPD programmes, can help to build children’s self-confidence and inspire them with a love of Shakespeare.
“We’re trying to ignite a lifelong relationship with Shakespeare’s work,” she said. “Many adults feel that the door to Shakespeare’s work was closed to them. What we want to do is make sure that the door is opened for children and stays open all through their school lives and out into the world of university and work.”
The next free schools’ broadcasts are of Hamlet on November 10, King Lear on February 9 and The Tempest on March 30. Places for broadcasts are limited and schools must register on the RSC website first.
To find out more about the RSC’s work with schools, go to www.rsc.org.uk/education