ben naylor

I’m tremendously excited to be heading to Madrid at the end of January to run a four-day workshop on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus with the actors of Téatro Kamikaze, winners of the Spanish National Theatre Award 2017.

We’ll be working on several of the public/political scenes from the play, exploring how they relate to current movements in Spanish, and more generally European, politics: democratic deadlock and media manipulation, historic dictatorship and incipient nationalism, secession and insurgency. We’ll also be working on developing a new translation of the play, which remains relatively unknown and very rarely performed in Spain.

I’m especially pleased that the project brings together two exceptionally talented former students, who have been instrumental in organising the work: Kamikaze ensemble member and star of Las Chicas del Cable Martiño Rivas, who was part of the first MA Acting cohort at Central in 2010, and actor/director Paula Rodriguez of Teatro Inverso, who was in the 2014 cohort.

For personal-political reasons, I’m also very glad that I will be in the EU, working on Shakespeare’s great study of hatred and enmity in the tongue of Elizabethan England’s great enemy, on January 31st. What miserable foolishness it is to leave this all behind.

Hasta la victoria siempre.