India, London, Bath, Oundle & Poland – 2010!

2010 is shaping up to be quite a Shakespeare-centric year…

In January, courtesy of the British Council, I’ll be in India, running some Shakespeare workshops:

11-15th – Kolkata
18th-22nd – Pune

Then at the end of February, there’ll be a week-long workshop in London for professional actors. If you’re interested in joining the London workshop, then click here and fill in the form.

Then I return to the fabulous Bath Literature Festival on the 28th February.

Then to the Oundle Festival of Literature on March 15th.

Then Poland in May, for Macmillan:

18th – Gdansk (home of the New Globe)
19th – Warsaw
20th – Cracow

More details of all will be up soon!

Shakespeare Pro App – on iTunes now!

The Shakespeare Pro App is now on iTunes – and includes mine and my father’s Shakespeare’s Words Glossary…

- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare…

- Every difficult word defined…

- Tales from Shakespeare – A series of 20 short versions of Shakespeare’s plays aimed at a younger audience.

- Random Quotes – simply shake your device for a random quote.

And much more!

Click here for more on the App’s features…

The Night Before Christmas…

Slightly off-topic, but the performances begin today for the next play I’m acting in: a revival of Anthony Neilson’s The Night Before Christmas!

A very fun, very silly, not-for-children 1hr comedy, playing at the Hen & Chickens theatre, 1st-19th December at 9.30pm…

Click here for the Facebook Group Event Page, and you can follow me & how the show’s doing on Twitter…

Come one, come all…

BBC Blast – Othello Retold

The workshop as part of Akala’s HipHop Shakespeare Company Othello Retold project with BBC Blast can now be seen on the BBC iPlayer…

And my father, David Crystal, has written a blog-post about it, so touched was he by one of the sequences…

Sonnet talk at Shakespeare’s Globe

Giving a talk on the Sonnets in Original Pronunciation – 7pm tonight with David Crystal, at Shakespeare’s Globe…

Hip-hop Shakespeare workshop

A couple of videos from the Shakespeare workshop I gave last week, for the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company & BBC Blast’s Othello Re-told project…

Wells Festival of Literature, October 22nd, 12.30pm

Last Toast talk for the time being, tomorrow (October 22nd) at the Wells Festival of Literature 12.30pm at the Bishop’s Palace, Wells, Somerset…

Come one, come all… Follow this link for more details…

Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company’s Othello Retold

To Manchester to give a Shakespeare workshop for Akala’s Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company and BBC Blast’s Othello Retold project…

Following on…

Dear followers of Toast

I’m pleased to let you know Toast has become a great success! The paperback published in June and reprinted in September, the reviews glow, and there’s still one more lit-fest talk coming up – the Wells Festival of Literature on October 22nd!

And while I’m still running around giving workshops and schools talks, I’ll be blogging a little less frequently on this site for the time being, as:

- I’m producing the second show for my theatre company shiningman. The new play Gilbert is Dead by Robin French will be playing at one of London’s last Victorian music halls, Hoxton Hall, 4th-29th November.

Follow the rehearsals, book – and win! – tickets, at www.gilbertisdead.co.uk and http://twitter.com/Gilbert_Shirley

- I’ve just finished acting in a short film, Notes directed by James Sharpe, and I’ll be acting in a play later in December.

More details of both will be at my main site, www.bencrystal.com…

News of future Toast activity – and there looks to be plenty coming -including an India tour, a full Shakespeare production, and a possible TV programme – will all be posted here!

Yours

Ben

UCLA Sonnet Workshop

Last week I gave a bunch of visiting UCLA students a talk on the sonnets.

One of them, a very kind Natalie de Luna, wrote up the talk:

Crystal reminded us to keep in mind the brilliance of Shakes where every punctuation, every caesura, every capitalization is there for a reason. Every imperfect iambic pentameter line is meant to show the character’s distraught brokenness.

He had us each perform the sonnets, many people took the creative notch up a bit as they turned the sonnets into a funky rap, or brought it down to a mellow tone, with doubled voices emphasizing capitalized letters and the melancholy of Sonnet 29.

And here’s Kelsey Sharpe’s report of the session, with a couple of videos:

As Crystal’s great desire is for people to perform, rather than just read, Shakespeare, he told us that he wanted every one of our 60-odd members to say at least one line before leaving. After a massive circle-reading of Sonnet 29, he asked us to come up in our groups and perform it for the rest of the room. One brave volunteer then read the entire sonnet to the class, and the session ended with Crystal stressing once more the need for everybody to experience performing Shakespeare — to “get the words off of the page and into [our] mouths.”