Such Stuff: The Shakespeare's Globe Podcast

In the latest episode of our series on arts and wellbeing, we catch up with some of the creatives and scholars in our Globe network to find out about the inspirations that have helped them through this period and why the arts provide such a vital lifeline. Without the opportunity to go out and experience the arts in person, we’ve been turning inwards, to books, televisions, films, plays and paintings. How can inspirations help to find escape in difficult periods? Or bring comfort in moments of crisis? We hear from actor and writer Tom Stuart in conversation with our literary manager Jess Lusk. And lecturer and senior researcher Dr Will Tosh speaks to actor, storyteller, writer and Globe Education Practitioner Alex Kanefsky, and Shakespeare scholar Dr Vanessa Lim. This episode does contain discussion of mental health issues.

In this second episode in our series on the connection between the arts and wellbeing, we dig a little deeper into expression and vulnerability. Whilst watching or engaging in the arts and creativity can offer an incredible release, the process can also be very exposing. After a year of isolation with limited outward expression, how do we move back into the world and what lessons might we learn from the performing arts and artistic practices in making this transition? Director Sarah Bedi and drama therapist Annemarie Gaillard share their experiences of working in rehearsal rooms, and especially with young actors, to facilitate nourishing creative experiences. We’ll be asking, what are the benefits but also anxieties of being vulnerable? How can we build safe spaces in the performing arts? And how can all of us learn from creative practices to reach out after this period of isolation, to find expression through the arts, whilst also taking proper care of ourselves? This episode does contain discussion of mental health issues and anxiety.

This month, we’ve been celebrating LGBTQ+ History Month. In this episode, our Head of Learning and former drama teacher Lucy Cuthbertson explores the importance of creating a positive environment in schools for LGBTQ+ students and staff. Lucy speaks to eight former students about their experiences of being LGBTQ+ in school and how important drama was as a safe space to explore. They also discuss why role models in school and representation in the curriculum matter so much. Plus, Lucy chats to Dr Elly Barnes about the work her charity Educate & Celebrate is doing in schools. Lucy and Elly have both been working in educational spaces as educators, as teachers, as activists and as champions of LGBTQ+ rights for years, and together they reflect on how far we’ve come and what else schools can be doing to be LGBTQ+ inclusive.

In our second advent episode, we turn to a snowy story from the history of the Globe theatre, our very own Christmas miracle. In the icy winter of 1598, a theatre was dismantled on the north side of the river, the timbers rolled through the snowy streets of London, and the Globe theatre was born on the south side of the river. But what really happened that wintery night between Christmas and New Year in 1598? Was the Globe really built in a day? Our very own historical Scrooge Dr Will Tosh does some all-important myth busting with artistic director and ardent miracle-believer Michelle Terry. The resulting story we uncover might be a little less flamboyant… but maybe, just maybe, it’s no less magical.

In this episode, we return to the subject of Shakespeare and Fear, unpicking the relationship between our very real fears and anxieties and our obsession with ghost stories, hauntings and imaginary terrors. As part of our digital festival exploring the subject, our 2018 production of Macbeth returns to the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as Macbeth: A Conjuring, a semi-staged reading. So, we revisited interviews with director Rob Hastie and actors Michelle Terry and Paul Ready on conjuring, superstition and catharsis. And we caught up with Dr Will Tosh to discuss the uncanny resonances between today’s fearful state of affairs and the bitter winter in which Shakespeare wrote Macbeth.

In the final episode of our series on Shakespeare and Race, we take a closer look at the question that has underpinned the entire series: how do we decolonise the works of Shakespeare? We hear myriad suggestions and ideas from contributors from across the series – actors, academics and students. And we return to festival co-curators Michelle Terry (Artistic Director) and Professor Farah Karim-Cooper (Head of Higher Education and Research) to reflect on the festival and to ask what next for making decolonisation a reality at Shakespeare’s Globe and beyond. This episode also features a special reading from festival co-curator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith of James Baldwin’s Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.

In the third episode of our series on Shakespeare and Race, we look at our education system and the way that we’re teaching the next generation. The way we teach and the way we learn shapes the way we understand the world. If that education is permeated with this idea that whiteness is the norm, and everything else is the other, that is what we take out into the world. And when it comes to Shakespeare, it means generations are brought up with a narrow set of ideas about what Shakespeare’s plays mean, who they are for and why they matter. More and more, across schools, universities and drama schools, we are hearing calls to decolonise the curriculum. In this episode, we’ll be exploring what that means and what a decolonised curriculum might look like. And of course, we’ll be asking what that means for the way we learn the works of Shakespeare. We chat to playwright and founder of the Diversity School, Steven Kavuma, about his experiences of drama school education. And we talk to Dr Shona Hunter about how whiteness dominates the educational context.

With the theatre closed, we take a moment to ask: when we reopen, should we really go back to business as usual? We don’t just want to pay lip service to Black Lives Matter and then move on without making any real changes to the way we operate as an organisation. It is not enough to stand against racism in theory, we need to be actively anti-racist. This is the first in a series of episodes dedicated to Shakespeare and race, specifically Shakespeare and anti-racism. So, we’ll be asking what if we looked at the world – our own world, the world of theatre and the world of Shakespeare – through whiteness? The way we talk about race is so often couched in ‘otherness’, in putting labels on groups based on difference; but different to what, other to what? In this episode we will be unpicking what that term whiteness means, speaking to sociologist Dr Steve Garner. And over the course of the next few episodes we will look in depth at the way we read Shakespeare, the way we educate students in classrooms, lecture halls and rehearsal rooms and the way we operate our stages through this presumption that whiteness is somehow the norm.

This week on the podcast, we return to the Shakespeare diaries. Our very own actor artistic director Michelle Terry and actor Paul Ready discuss Shakespeare’s plays from isolation. This week, they discuss As You Like It. With questions sent in by our audience, Michelle and Paul consider why Rosalind and Celia’s relationship is so central to the play, why audiences seem to love Rosalind so much and why this bonkers play is one of their most beloved!

This week on the podcast, we take a moment of reflection. As the future of theatre is in question, we take inspiration from the Globe’s past. What does this rich history of reinvention, of imagination and an enduring determination to tell stories mean to us today? And how do we move into the future when theatre may never be the same again? We asked members of the Globe family far and wide to reflect with us, building an audio time capsule of the Globe and what it means to them. This episode celebrates memory: of people, places and things and how in the act of remembrance, we begin to slowly stitch ourselves back together and look to the future with all the promise and hope of rebirth and renewal.

This week on the podcast, we’re joined by special guest Maggie O’Farrell. The author of eight novels, plus the Sunday Time no. 1 best-selling memoir I am, I am, I am, she has been nominated for the Costa Novel Award three times, winning it for The Hand That First Held Mine. Her new book – Hamnet – is set in the summer of 1596 and imagines the story behind one of Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies and its connection to Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet. It’s a stunning novel and a tender story of love and grief that shifts the focus to the family that Shakespeare left behind in Stratford when he moved to London to become the playwright we know today. We spoke to Maggie about how she researched the story and how she approached the daunting prospect of writing about such a well-known figure as Shakespeare. This episode features an extract from Hamnet, read by Maggie O’Farrell.

This week on the podcast we introduce Shakespeare’s Globe’s new project: Love in Isolation. Love in Isolation will see an extraordinary array of artists share some of Shakespeare’s greatest words from their place of isolation. To mark the launch of the new project, Michelle spoke to renowned director Peter Brook about Shakespeare’s sonnets. They discussed the unique insight into Shakespeare that the sonnets provide and how the idea of love permeates all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This episode also includes performances from actress Kathryn Hunter.