Drama and Theatre Arts extended workshop in Stratford-upon-Avon

15 Drama and Theatre Arts undergraduate students are invited to take part in a 3-day programme of activity, with one night’s accommodation in Stratford-upon-Avon, attendance of a public forum event and a trip to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It. 
The extended workshop is an opportunity for students to spend 3 days working intensively with RSC Director Fi Ross on a Research and Development project. It will be practical, creative, and discursive, with a particular focus on working physically. Inspired by Mental Health Awareness week, the workshop will consider the effects of representation on stage on the mental health of young people, asking questions such as: How do the stories we see, read, and tell in our daily lives help us understand our own and others’ experiences? How can we challenge the expectations of audiences and actors in terms of representation of gender, ethnicity, disability, and class?
The focus for the research and development will be a short story The Yellow Wallpaper, written in 1892 by Charlotte Gilman Perkins. It centres on a young mother who is under doctors’ orders to take a ‘rest cure’, but in her isolation she develops a strange obsession with the wallpaper in her room. Reality and illusion collide as she begins to see a trapped figure behind the wallpaper – is it a hallucination, a ghost or a personification of her own psyche? What occurs when the figure escapes from the confines of the paper? The story is part psychological horror, part feminist critique, part modern gothic.

University of Birmingham education workshop 2019. Photo by Sam Allard c RSC.