What would Garrick do? Twenty-first-century theatre tuition with eighteenth-century material Dr James Harriman-Smith, Newcastle University

Event details

Centre for Research on Education and Social Justice Seminar

James proposes to do three things in this seminar. First he will briefly present the unprecedented quantity of writing about acting that appeared in England in the 1700s as a rich, but neglected, source of material for contemporary practitioners and teachers. Second, he will argue that unlocking the potential of these eighteenth-century sources requires a particular kind of collaboration between academics and theatre professionals, one which is focussed on a playful and experimental expansion of rehearsal practices and other kinds of artistic process. Thirdly and finally, he will suggest how such creative collaboration across disciplines, professions and periods might serve as the basis of exercises for those learning and teaching the art of acting today.

NB Restricted wheelchair access to this venue. 

James Harriman-Smith

James Harriman-Smith is a public orator and lecturer in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at Newcastle University. His research focusses on the ways that we write about acting, and he has published on Garrick’s death scenes, Diderot’s paradox on the actor, Staël’s Corinne, and Shakespeare’s editors. His first book, on theatrical transitions on the eighteenth-century stage, will be published by Cambridge University Press.