#ewan fernie

[heyho-simonrussellbeale]

At the heart of the initiative is the three-part documentary series for BBC Two and iPlayer titled Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius, featuring contributions from Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Adrian Lester, Lolita Chakrabarti, Martin Freeman and Jessie Buckley, alongside academics and writers including James Shapiro, Jeanette Winterson, Lucy Jago, Jeremy O’Harris and Ewan Fernie.

The documentary series will be made available from 8 November at 9pm.

A whole host of archived productions and Shakespeare-based films will be released across October and November to celebrate the contributions made by the First Folio.

There will also be specially created new introductions for many of these, featuring David Tennant on Hamlet, Richard Eyre on King Lear, Janet Suzman on Wars of the Roses, Gregory Doran on the Shakespeare Gala from the RSC, Russell T Davies on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mirren on As You Like It, Hugh Quarshie on Othello, Steven Berkoff on Hamlet at Elsinore, Simon Russell Beale on The Hollow Crown, and Ian McKellen on All is True.

[funeral]

Ewan Fernie, The Demonic: Literature and Experience

[kelseyridge13]

Much to the agony of theologians, true freedom permits evil. It is irreducibly ambivalent, unstable and complicating. It is good in itself, but at the same time may be wicked.

Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter)

[shakespearenews]

How Shakespeare has inspired freedom movements - Professor Ewan Fernie

[uobattop-blog]

Being Reborn: An Update on The Marina Project

In April of last year (2016), Professor Ewan Fernie of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, along with his project partner, Dr Katharine Craik (Oxford Brookes), led a six-day series of Research and Development workshops with Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) practitioners. These workshops were aimed at developing a new play entitled Marina, Fernie and Craik’s response to Shakespeare’s Pericles. For an overview of the project, including a working synopsis of the play, click here.

[Philip Arditti (Lysimachus) during the workshops. Photo by Katharine Craik.]

As we mentioned in our previous blog post (linked above), the next stage of the project is the publication of Ewan’s and Katharine’s essay on their uniquely creative research process. The collection in which the essay will be published, New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity, is edited by Fernie and Paul Edmondson, and is expected for publication later this year (2017) in the Arden Shakespeare imprint. The essay offers an excitingly detailed look at the theories, aims and processes behind the Marina project, and we’re giving you a sneak peek at some of the key insights here…

[Artwork of the ‘Chastity Bird’ character in Marina, by Tom de Freston]

As a project that engages with Shakespeare but also with some of the most urgent and controversial issues of our time, Marina is richly complex . As well as placing the character of Marina more firmly at the centre of Pericles, Ewan and Katharine wanted to explore whether her commitment, as an immigrant, to ‘radical chastity’ might make ‘a progressive, critical and questioning contribution to the shared life and culture both of the displaced and of the host society’. One reason for exploring this is, as they say, the fact that ‘the challenging subject of migration and sexuality remains more or less untheorised’.

Furthermore, Ewan and Katharine’s vision for the R&D workshops, and for the project more widely, was ‘to foster an experimental conversation which might break through the habits of thought which typically keep our disciplines so cleanly separate from one another, and aloof from the wider world’.

This cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach is exemplified by the range of contributors to the project, who were as follows:

-          Professor Ewan Fernie, Chair of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute. Expert on Shakespeare and politics, philosophy, spirituality, and religion, especially in relation to modern and contemporary life.

-          Dr. Katharine Craik, Reader in Early Modern Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Expert on the history of the body, mind and emotions, and, of course, the works of Shakespeare.

-          Erica Whyman, Deputy Artistic Director of the RSC. Erica was a key player in the development of Marina, with Fernie and Craik attending several meetings with her to discuss the themes of the work as they emerged. ‘Radical mischief’, Erica’s mission-defining concept for The Other Place, was an important influence in the development of Marina as a character, and on Craik and Fernie’s concept of ‘radical chastity’.

-          Richard Twyman, Artistic Director of English Touring Theatre. In the past, Richard has directed extensively with the RSC and the Royal Court Theatre, as well as having worked at ‘Le Jongle’ migrant camp in Calais.

-          Rana Haddad, Syrian-British journalist for the BBC and Al Jazeera, who had recently returned from working with displaced Syrians on the ground at the time of the workshops.

-          Abdul-Rehman Malik, journalist, and Programme Manager for the Radical Middle Way, an organisation which provides faith-inspired guidance to enable change within communities across the world.

-          Dr. Mark Williams, psychologist and expert in depression and suicide.

-          Professor Corinne Saunders, medievalist and medical humanities scholar at Durham University.

-          Professor David Fuller, experimental literary critic and scholar at Durham University.

-          Tom de Freston, painter and (at the time) University of Birmingham Creative Fellow. Tom is currently artist-in-residence at Medicine Unboxed, an organisation exploring the links between art, medicine, and the humanities.

-          David Knotts, composer. David has previously worked with prestigious organisations including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera, and the Endymion Ensemble.

[Thusitha Jayasundera (Thaisa) during the workshops. Photo by Katharine Craik.]

The workshops included a group of BAME actors with experience of migration, deliberately chosen to broaden and enrich the conversation. 

The actors involved were:

-          Kae Alexander (Philoten/Chastity Bird), best known for her work in Game of Thrones, Bad Education, and House of Anubis. Kae is originally from Japan, and moved to London at the age of 10.

-          Philip Arditti (Lysimachus), known for his role as Uday Hussein in House of Saddam and Saleh Al-Zahid in The Honourable Woman. Philip is of Swiss-Italian and Jewish Sephardic heritage, and grew up in Istanbul before moving to London in 1999.

-          Paul Bazely (Pericles), best known as Troy in Benidorm, as well as for roles in Casualty and Black Mirror. Paul has a very developed interest in non-violence, which he contributed to the group.

-          Vincent Ebrahim (Antioch), best known as Charmain Beukes in Sewende Laan and Ashwin Kumar in The Kumars at No.42. Vincent is a South African actor who migrated to England in 1976.

-          Thusitha Jayasundera (Thaisa), best known as Tash Bandara in Holby City and Ayesha Masood in Silent Witness. She has also appeared in the National Theatre interpretation of War Horse. Thusitha is a Sri Lankan actress who lives in the UK.

-          Aysha Kala (Marina), known for her work in Second Coming, Indian Summers and Shameless. Aysha is a British-Indian actress born in London.

[Philip Arditti (Lysimachus) and Thusitha Jayasundera (Thaisa) during the workshops. Photo by Katharine Craik.]

Finally, following the workshops, Ewan and Katharine sought the opinion of another scholar, Professor Dawn Chatty, renowned expert on migration and forced displacement, and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. This discussion touched especially on the need for research into the links between political and personal forms of displacement.

This rich and varied collaborative team allowed the Marina project to develop in novel and unforeseen ways, and these are detailed in Ewan and Katharine’s essay. Some key realisations and changes included moving the play’s setting from Brixton to Seven Sisters, exploring the role of chastity in Islamic culture, and testing ways in which Marina might resist the demands and traumas of patriarchal society.

Katharine summed up the pace and excitement of these developments: "We arrived on Monday morning with a strong concept and some difficult questions. We left on Friday afternoon with a new play crackling into presence. During one extraordinarily intense week, The Other Place became a laboratory in which to test out our hunches, give colour to our scene sketches - and, of course, to get our inklings up on their feet to see how they fared off the page. Introducing 'Marina' to our RSC cast and director felt like opening a tinderbox next to a box of matches. The team's exceptional creative openness showed us what research can be at its best: a vivid, challenging, spontaneous, unpredictable process which draws inescapably from life itself. Our new play is now pulsating with energy, and we can't wait to get back to our desks to develop the script further in the coming months. Meanwhile we continue to work with our collaborators - both creative and academic - on a book about the work of the Marina Project at large."

Influenced by other work they have both done in the arena of civic Shakespeare Ewan and Katharine also hope to discover through their continuing project ‘whether an engaged approach to the plays [might] open up avenues of protest, opposition and dissent, helping to forge new freedoms within civil society for its nay-sayers and outsiders, those who explicitly wish to challenge the way things are’. Their essay in New Places is the next step in that approach, and in sharing their vision further. Its publication will be announced here and on the Shakespeare Institute and The Other Place websites.

[uartslibraries]

The Poet's Quest For God: 21st Century Poems of Faith, Doubt and Wonder

edited by Fr. Oliver Brennan & Todd Swift with Kelly Davio & Cate Myddleton-Evans; introduction by Ewan Fernie

call # PN6110.R4 P64 2016

[bwthornton]

David Garrick Part 2: The Shakespeare Jubilee #StratforduponAvon #RSC Professor Ewan Fernie of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, explains the plans and what actually happened.

https://stratford-upon-avon-theatre.blogspot.com/2019/09/david-garrick-part-2-shakespeare.html

[noshitshakespeare]

Hey, I was wondering if you know any great modern books on Shakespeare himself or his works... My English teacher loves Shakespeare and I'm graduating from high school this year and I want to give him a book as a gift to thank him for his wonderful lectures on Shakespeare because he inspired me to go study English lit at uni after summer break.

What a lovely idea! 

I do know a lot of great modern books on Shakespeare, but there are a lot of them out there. 

For quite a few years general books about Shakespeare have been a little out of fashion, with more people concentrating on very specific things about Shakespeare. But in recent years there have been a few that aren’t too esoteric and that are really quite well written. Here are some recommendations:

Kiernan Ryan’s Shakespeare’s Universality (honestly anything by him is pure gold)

Ewan Fernie’s new book, Shakespeare for Freedom

It’s not very very new, but the general Shakespeare-loving public have always been quite fond of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (controversial in the academic world)

James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare is also informative and eminently readable, as is his newer book, 1606: The Year of Lear, which came out last year

David and Ben Crystal’s The Shakespeare Miscellany is a cute little book I can always recommend for Shakespeare lovers

Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is a very pretty book of beautifully written criticism containing facsimiles of every sonnet

Ryan North’s To Be or Not To Be and Romeo and/or Juliet choose your own adventures are obviously not very serious but they are very adorable. I think they would make a nice gift.

A Shakespeare biography (see this post for a list of recommendations)

Maybe I could help you better if you could tell me what particular aspects of Shakespeare your teacher is especially interested in. Failing these options, giving him a nice edition of the plays is always an option: Shakespeare lovers can never have too many editions of his works!

[kelseyridge13]

Given everything we have learned about Shakespeare and freedom to this point, this forging of a link between Shakespeare and the suffragettes was really only natural. After all, the life in the plays isn’t exclusively male. If you had to choose, Juliet is a more important trailblazer for Shakespeare’s politics of freedom than Romeo. Even if all his characters were originally played by men, Shakespeare’s dramatic franchise clearly extends to women.

Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter)

[kelseyridge13]

I suggest that Shakespeare’s plays are a dramatic poem of freedom, and not just for their heroes, but for us all. What we do or do not make of them, in contemporary life and politics, is our responsibility.

Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter)

[kelseyridge13]

politically speaking, there is no settled or final solution in Shakespeare. Instead, play after play wages an unresolved, ongoing fight for freedom.

Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter)

[kelseyridge13]

Impatience with scholarly obfuscation is usually accompanied by a basic impatience with anything but (supposed) common sense.  What this effectively means is a distrust of really thinking, and a disdain for anything that might unsettle conventional assumptions, particularly through crossing or re-drafting formal, political, or theoretical boundaries.

Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare Now)

[funeral]

Ewan Fernie, The Demonic: Literature and Experience

[funeral]

I want to be a monster, a hurricane, all that is human is alien to me. I transgress all the laws established by man, I trample every value under foot, nothing of what is can define or limit me; yet I exist, I shall be the icy breath which will annihilate all life.

Jean-Paul Sartre quoted in Ewan Fernie, The Demonic: Literature and Experience

[uobattop-blog]

Marina: Radical chastity and Pericles in the 21st century

The university’s pioneering collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is already bearing exciting creative and academic fruit in the form of Professor Ewan Fernie’s Marina project, co-authored with Dr Katharine Craik (Oxford Brookes). Together with RSC director Richard Twyman, who has previously done theatre work in Syria and ‘Le Jongle’ refugee camp in Calais, Ewan and Katharine are developing Marina, a response to Shakespeare’s little-performed Pericles. This new work epitomises the collaboration’s vision of integrating the creative with the academic to forge a new kind of theatre.

The working synopsis

Fleeing to Europe in search of opportunity and escape from a precarious situation in their homeland, Marina and her parents, Pericles and Thaisa, are separated and scattered across the globe before winding up on the same street, Narrow Way, in Seven Sisters, London.

Adopted by a displaced Syrian businessman named Antioch, Marina had been adjusting well to life in the UK until she was suddenly and mysteriously trafficked into sexual slavery in the Seven Sisters brothel on Narrow Way. What ensues is a compelling story of self-discovery, physical and mental suffering, and a tumultuous family reunion.  At the heart of it all is Marina’s own ‘radical chastity’ and the challenge it presents to everyone she encounters, and to English culture more broadly.

The issues

Marina came about through the desire to explore the themes of grief and music in Pericles, as well as exploring the significance of Marina to the original play.  As it developed the project became more and more about reimagining Shakespeare’s work to be more powerful and pertinent in today’s society. The work is centred on the concept of ‘radical chastity’, which ‘rejects the given forms of life and love in the hope of something better’, and explores how ‘the very thing [chastity] that so often secures an oppressive patriarchy might offer grounds for resistance’ (Fernie & Craik). Far from being the mere remnant of bygone superstitions, chastity remains an important issue in our culture to this day, for example, within our own families. It is also the most visible point of cultural difference between the West and other societies, particularly those in the Middle East, a fact which cannot be ignored in the context of Pericles’ geographic setting.  

During the time of writing, the global migrant crisis also exploded, and the writers saw the opportunity to start a dialogue on the issue; Pericles, after all, is about a Middle Eastern family scattered by environmental turmoil and political persecution. Marina aims to ‘explore how intimate forms of disconnectedness are mirrored and refracted through political exile and geographical segregation, and vice versa’ (Fernie & Craik).

The process

In April, this work-in-progress was put through its paces in an intensive six-day research and development workshop. This event involved a cast of actors from a range of backgrounds and perspectives, which resulted in lively engagement on political, personal and theatrical levels, continuing the process of research. The workshop was led by Richard Twyman, Ewan Fernie and Katharine Craik, and also involved theatre practitioners and academics with expertise ranging from stage management to depression to the migration crisis. This workshop offered a unique opportunity to continue developing the play through an ‘incredibly intense and productive process of research’ (Fernie). At the start of the six-day process, the play consisted of a synopsis and several scenes; at the end, the play was set more securely in the present, and Marina was a more central and powerful protagonist.

Professor Ewan Fernie described the experience: ‘[The workshop] was challenging and enriching, and the power of this concerted cross-institutional collaboration was a real eye-opener – it was thrilling.’

The future

Marina is now in development with the RSC, and further work is planned around documenting this collaborative approach to theatre-making and research. Fernie and Craik are writing about the project for a new book published by the Arden Shakespeare imprint and appropriately titled New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity.