Here's a video of a discussion about Multicultural Shakespeare at Clapham library on 2 October 2013, with Karen Bryson, Nick Bailey, Tony Howard, and some searching questions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUf5aMvTNDU

And see our BLOG PAGE for a guest report on the whole evening by the playwright, director and producer Patricia Cumber:

Shakespeare’s words are my story, Karen Bryson stated at the end of the evening’s presentation; the journeys of his characters are my journey.

With these words, she summed up the dynamic relationship between actor and playwright, performer and audience. Conversations continued to hum in the atrium of Lambeth Library for a good while after the presentation ended. Shakespeare, whether you like or loathe his work, cannot be ignored.

Invited back to BBC WM's Chatback, BBA Shakespeare's Nicholas Bailey discussed Lindsay John's claim at the Conservative Party Conference that teaching Shakespeare via Rap and Hip Hop is 'racist'. For forty minutes of animated conversation, click on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01h45x8

Mr John's speech was partly based on his Daily Mail blog (12.12.2012), where he wrote:

"Hamlet doesn’t need a hip-hop sound track for young people to enjoy or understand it. It’s been doing just fine for the past 400 years. It is both patronising, and frankly racist, to think that black and brown kids in the inner cities will only ‘get’ Shakespeare if it’s set to a hip-hop beat and presented to them in 3-minute MTV Base-style chunks.

Young people listen to enough hip-hop already. They speak in dumbed down, risible street language. Why then would anyone in their right mind swap the mellifluous cadences of Shakespeare’s verse for the ugly patois of the streets?

One unlocks the joys of the English language; the other leads directly to disenfranchisement and the dole queue.

It is positively evil to deny those kids access to the manifold joys of hearing their national poet’s true voice, simply because of a culture of low expectations. What is worse is that this culture has been propagated by ardent metropolitan liberals who more often than not have themselves enjoyed all the benefits of a Rolls-Royce, Oxbridge education, with, I’d wager, absolutely no hip-hop whatsoever."

A BBA Shakespeare discussion at Clapham Library on October 8th, with actors Nicholas Bailey and Karen Bryson on why Shakespeare matters to them.

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