Arts
A day in the park with some ‘cool’ Shakespeare entertainment
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Shakespeare today: A rehearsal in progress
2016 sees the spotlight on one of Britain’s greatest exports, William Shakespeare, as part of the British Council’s global ‘Shakespeare Lives Programme’ which commemorates the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.
To show how exciting Shakespeare can be, Sri Lanka’s British Council Arts team has partnered with The Workshop Players as their new Artists-in-Residence, to present Sri Lanka’s first ever ‘Shakespeare in the Park’–A Midsummer Night’s Dream (April 28 and 29), The Merchant of Venice (May 7 and 
and Othello (May 14 and 15) at the Vihara Maha Devi park.
The Workshop Players’ Director, Jerome De Silva explained why ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ was such an important project. “There is a big interest in Shakespeare in Sri Lanka, especially amongst students, academics and university students. Also there is a keen interest among translators. By doing Shakespeare in the Park, we make his work more accessible to the bigger audience.”
“Shakespeare plays such a big part in the national curriculum for Sri Lanka in terms of English studies, but we wanted to show that his work gives us so much more than that,” said British Council’s Arts Manager Tanya Warnakulasuriya.
The British Council Arts programme is keen to inspire young people studying the bard for O-Level and A-Level and show that learning Shakespeare can be fun and equip them with key critical thinking skills if they understand his work as more than just an English text to be rote learned for exams.
As well as theatre the Arts team is partnering with the Sri Lanka Foundation to show Shakespeare films, adaptations and also the new genre of “Filmed Theatre” from London, in a year long film programme starting this April. The movies will be accompanied by panel discussions and fringe events looking at the themes of the story.
Tanya also goes on to explain the other art genres that Shakespeare had impact on. “He also taught us about the rhythm of speech. He cleverly used the speech rhythms to differentiate between groups of characters. For example in Macbeth we see the noblemen speaking in Iambic Pentameter and the witches speaking in Throchaic Tetrameter to differentiate them from the ordinary folk in the play.”
These rhythms and words will be explored more with Sri Lanka’s young musicians and rappers who will be collaborating in a workshop with a Hip Hop poet and Rapper from the UK, who is already working with the Royal Shakespeare Company to show young people how “cool” Shakespeare really is.