The Alternative Approach

Shakespeare's gifts to us are many: fact

Whilst this will always be true, the world today is very different from the world of Shakespeare's time. We believe that there is much more to Shakespeare than the legacy of his plays and poems.

Shakespeare was a genius, and people who love and admire his work show him an awful lot of respect. Sometimes so much respect that they wrongly believe it's sacrilege to 'mess' about with his work. Our viewpoint is rather different.

We believe that over the hundreds of years that have passed, and the many hundreds of years yet to happen, his works are in danger of becoming fossilised. Time, the great healer, is also the great destroyer; it gets to us all, even Shakespeare. And not only would that would be a dreadful tragedy in itself, it would be doing his work, and people throughout time, a great disservice.

For us it is important to keep a grounded perspective on his achievements; Shakespeare is only a point (notwithstanding maybe the most significant point) in the continuum of human understanding and development. If the real significance of Shakespeare is to be fully explored, it is imperative that we keep alive the tradition by creating new work out of his processes and his own body of work.

It’s not been easy trying to get inside the mind of this most incredible genius of words, yet our journey over 20 years ago has been exhilarating, to say the least.

Originally set up as The Shakespeare Bones Project, in 2013 we expanded our approach to become the The Alternative Shakespeare Project.

Our focus is on Shakespeare's life and work, BUT also the work that has come out of those, both to date and to come. To that end our work centres around:

Understanding what, how, and why Shakespeare achieved what he did, and also what his work has directly or indirectly inspired since his death
Helping to displace Shakespeare from the popular view as the apex and focal point of human understanding and development, preferring instead to see him as the most significant point to date of that ongoing process
Learning as much as possible about the human condition by seeing his plays and poems not just as great works of literature but, more importantly, as phenomenal repositories of knowledge, insights, and guides to the human condition
Recognising that his real benefit to us is in many ways still to be fully realised, by discovering in his works the raw material (words, language, themes, characters, ideas etc) that may yet be further worked upon or developed in new ways
Applying the many changes, discoveries, and limitations in society and knowledge that have come to pass since Shakespeare's time, so that his work can be better put into a contextual perspective
Creating and curating new works that perpetuate this continuum tradition and which are directly or indirectly inspired by, or come out of, his work.

This approach requires many different angles:

Seeking to find answers to the question "what really went on in the mind of Shakespeare?"
Applying a series of 'what if' questions to everything, to get under perceived truths
Undertaking research into both his work and the work that he has inspired, and making available the results of that research
Commissioning new works to keep the legacy of Shakespeare a living tradition
Sharing our research and discoveries
Working collaboratively with other individuals and organisations that share, and can contribute to, the ideals and objectives of this project.

An alternative Approach

The Globe Theatre today performs Shakespeare’s plays in a Theatre close to their original physical setting; our approach is about revitalising his works using a non-physical ‘creative space’.

Finding new ways of performing his existing plays, or putting them into new settings, is not what this is about! We believe that the real benefit of his legacy is for us all is to be as radical and original as Shakespeare was himself; writing new, challenging drama using the words, themes, and characters of his work as the raw material, as DNA. In doing so, we believe Shakespeare’s work can be kept fresh and relevant for audiences throughout the world, for all time.

This work is more than keeping the finished works of Shakespeare alive. Even more important than that is the need to keep the mental processes and outlook he started well and truly alive, for all time. And even more importantly, understand just what we can learn from alternativeShakespeare.

We aim to provide a fresh approach to the world we know in everything we do. Our focus on Shakespeare is no different – our creative process is driven by our desire to approach Shakespeare’s life, legacy and work in a different way, throwing out the accepted ideals and academic to gain new insights into his plays.

So, we do things a bit differently. We don’t blindly follow the scholars and the academics who have the canonical opinions on who Shakespeare was and where his works have come from. We like to take a view on lots of different stances, not just the popular ones, or the ones we’ve accepted as “correct” over the last however many decades – and form our own opinions in the process.

We also don’t follow your typical creative process, tethered to the actor/director, writing/rehearsal/performance model. Our workshop-style projects are wholly collaborative and aimed at bringing people in to experience and explore Shakespeare in their own way, regardless of their experience or where they’ve come from. Everyone is welcome, and everyone’s insights are valued.

We’ve gone back to basics, studying the words at the very heart of Shakespeare’s works and mining them for new insights about his characters, stories and themes, applying history, philosophy, psychology, sociology and our own experiences of the world around us to have rich, insightful discussions that spark creative ideas and new perspectives on the plays we know and love.

We believe that theatre – and Shakespeare – is firmly rooted in the study of humanity, and this ethos informs all of our approaches to AlternativeShakespeare.