Bridget Escolme, PhD PGCE
Senior Lecturer in Drama
Contact details:
Tel: 020 7882 8568
Email: b.m.escolme@qmul.ac.uk
Room number: ArtsOne G15
Research interests:
- Early modern performance practice
- Contemporary performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
- The role of the audience
- Theatre for young people and Theatre in Education
Bridget Escolme researches and teaches historical theatre and its contemporary production, particularly early modern drama and the ways in which original and current staging practices produce space and subjectivity.
Recent published work, particularly Talking to the Audience, has explored the relationship between performer and audience in Shakespeare production; her current research is for a book, Madness and Theatricality, which explores the ways in which current performance conventions reproduce and revision ‘mad’ figures from the theatrical past.
Her research is underpinned by theatre practice; she has published work on her promenade production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in Shakespeare Survey, has worked as a dramaturg at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, as a performer for Unlimited Theatre at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and as a Theatre in Education practitioner.
She is a member of the International Shakespeare Association and is on the Architectural Advisory Committee of Shakespeare’s Globe, London. Recent guest lectures have included the Accents on Shakespeare series at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Harriet Walter, and a plenary lecture at the International Shakespeare Association conference in Stratford upon Avon.
She is a founder member of the Shakespeare in Performance network, an international seminar of Shakespeare performance critics.
Performance:
Coriolanus (director), Flaneur Productions, Minneapolis USA, 2005, 2006
Romeo and Juliet (dramaturgical advisor), dir. Sarah Punshon, West Yorkshire Playhouse Schools tour, 2003
Measure for Measure: A Performance Research Project (director), Leeds University Workshop Theatre; Met Studio Theatre; International Federation for Theatre Research, Amsterdam, 2002
Safety by Chris Thorpe, dir. John Spooner (performer), Unlimited Theatre, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Festival, 2002
Hamlet (dramaturg), dir. Ian Brown, West Yorkshire Playhouse, 2002
Publications:
Books:
In preparation: Madness and Theatricality (in negotiation with Cambridge University Press)
Shakespeare Handbooks: Antony and Cleopatra. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)
Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self. (London: Routledge, 2005)
Essays in edited collections:
In preparation: ‘Shakespeare’s Theatrical Contexts since the ‘Shakespeare Revolution’, Performance Criticism, ed. Sarah Werner (forthcoming, Palgrave)
‘Mark Rylance and Shakespeare’s Globe’, Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (forthcoming London: Routledge 2007)
‘Making Things Difficult: Anne Bogart and W. B. Worthen’, Shakespeare, Language and the Stage: The Fifth Wall. eds. Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels (London: Arden Shakespeare 2005)
‘Authority, Empowerment and Fairy Tales: Theatre for Young People’, Contemporary Theatres in Europe, eds. Nicholas Ridout and Joe Kelleher, (London: Routledge, 2005)
‘The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah and Eileen Pennington’, Popular Theatre in Political Culture, eds. Tim Prentki and Jan Salman (Bristol: Intellect, 2000)
Articles and Review Articles:
‘Living Monuments: Shakespeare’s Rome on the Contemporary Stage’, Shakespeare Survey vol 60, October 2007
Review of ‘King Lear: Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Boston 2005’, Shakespeare (Routledge 2006) no. 3, 2006
‘ “The Greatest Dramatist…”: The RSC Complete Works Season’ Contemporary Theatre Review Vol. 15, no.4, 2005
Play edition:
Introduction to and co-editor of Making a Difference: The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah, collection of three plays commissioned by Blah Blah Blah (Leeds: Alumnus 2004)
Programme Notes:
Notes to Hamlet, West Yorkshire Playhouse 2002.