Summer Intensive: Improvised Shakespeare

This experienced intensive runs every evening from Monday 24th August to Friday 28th August , 7pm-9.30pm.

Experienced (18 months+) A class for skillful players, especially those who have finished improv training programmes at their school and are looking to widen their horizons. These classes will make the assumption that you are comfortable performing longform improvisation and will push you.

Learn to improvise Shakespeare in-depth 5 evenings in a row with the same teacher and group. Just like our courses but jam packed into one week! 

William Shakespeare: the bard, England’s national poet, the world’s greatest dramatist. Untouchable, inimitable… unimprovisable, right? Surely you can’t just ‘make up’ Shakespeare? You absolutely can and it’s beautiful and hilarious in equal measure. Join us on this six-week course where you will achieve the impossible by improvising prose, poetry, insults, soliloquies, asides, sonnets, maybe even a play within a play, and more, in the style of Shakespeare.

We will delve into the real works for inspiration, but not so much we get lost in it. Using a range of techniques and games, a mixture of short and long form improvisation, and a touch of parody, we’ll have Shakespeare’s quill putting words straight into our mouths.

Exploring the range of Shakespeare’s genres and themes – comedic, tragic, historic, and the simply weird; we’ll become improvised royals and nobles, fools, witches, ‘rude mechanicals’, unrequited lovers, witty youths, warriors and fairies.

Who is it for?

If you’re interested in making up Shakespeare-style scenes and have about a year of improvisation experience, then you! No previous study or performance of Shakespeare is necessary.