Hi, I'm Rowan Mackenzie, PhD researcher at the Shakespeare Institute and founder of
Shakespeare Unbard which uses Shakespeare with marginalized
communities and individuals so people with mental health issues, people with
learning disabilities, people within the criminal justice system, people
who have experienced homelessness and other areas of marginalization within the world that
we live in today, so I got the opportunity to talk a little bit about
some of my work and so in terms of my research and also how Shakespeare Unbard
works and where we're going with it
so I hope you find it of interest. For me my research and my PhD thesis which is
due in at the end of this year is around creating space for Shakespeare in
non-traditional settings, so using Shakespeare and looking at the
theoretical frameworks of French spatial theory and how spaces are
altered and amended and changed by the activities that go on within them, so how
a room in a theatre can be a rehearsal room but also how a prison
library can be a rehearsal room, how a room in a university building can be a
rehearsal room and how actually all of those things have become less important
and are changed and altered but just doing what at the time activity goes on
but on an ongoing basis and how it changes people's perceptions and how Shakespeare
can be used to bring to life the heterotopic opportunities of theatre and
to often give voice to those people who may be marginalized by society for a
whole raft of different reasons and previously maybe couldn't find their own
voices but how Shakespeare can give them a way
of being heard in a way that society deems acceptable and but also in a way
that society stops and takes notice and for me that's really important and also
giving people the ability to build their own self-confidence to overcome a
lot of the traumas that maybe they've experienced, to be able to find that way
of articulating their inner thoughts and feelings and to build emotional
resilience and as I say to give them a future that looks at the
opportunities that they may have and in the course of my research I've been
really fortunate and I've got to work with some amazing companies so I've worked
with Flute Theatre both in the UK and also spent some time in Barcelona a
few years ago - they're working with Kelly Hunter and her talented actors with
marginalized audiences - people with learning disabilities on the autism spectrum.
I'm Shakespeare consultant for Blue Apple theatre down in Winchester who are a
entirely learning disabled theatre company and do some fabulous productions
so I worked with them closely last year on their version of The Tempest and worked
with organisations that have worked with people with mental health issues, so
companies like Out of Character up in York and also working a lot with
psychology services in various prisons to really help to use Shakespeare to
help people with mental health problems but one of my big passions is
working directly as a theatre practitioner in prisons in England and
so that's where Shakespeare Unbard was founded from and I have the privilege of
working in a number of UK prisons - so three at the moment but that looks
like it might be growing as we go forward and once we come through the Covid
crisis and I certainly hope that it does because it brings to life some
amazing changes for people - so my first long-term prison engagement was in
HMP Gartrey down in Leicestershire where I got the opportunity to go in and
to set up a fairly short-term project that the National Research Council
approved looking at whether or not we could put on a really shortened
production of Macbeth - so 30-40 minutes in length that went so well that in
October 2018 the governor stood up at the end when we received our standing
ovation - not of the timeframe that Michael talks about in his video - we
didn't have for 18 minutes I'm afraid but we did have everybody on their feet and applauding
them and so the governor stood up and said 'right this project has come to an
end' and there was this horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I
think the actors felt the same and she said and we now have a drama group as
part of our normal regime - so from that the guys spoke to me about well can we
create a theatre company and so that's exactly what we did - so it's a completely
collaboratively owned theatre company owned equally between myself and 15 other
people and the difference is they're serving life sentences however
each of us has an equal voice and each of us has an equal opinion so we work
together- so there's 14 men and one transgender lady in the group and
myself and we work together to choose plays, adapt them, edit them, rehearse them
and then put on performances - so during our two-and-a-half years together so far
we've worked on Macbeth, we delivered Julius Caesar which was really
interesting and trying to work on how to get your actors to riot in a prison, not
something ever thought I'd do and neither running around wearing a
toga fashioned out of a prison bedsheet but I can say I've done it and
then we went on so they chose the Merchant of Venice as their third
production and I'd kind of challenged back and said come on a minute guys
religious unrest and you know and is it something we want to tackle in
prison and their response was yeah absolutely because it's not about
Shylock being a Jew for us it's about Shylock being shunned by society so
actually our Shylock wasn't a Jew he was an individual who'd been released having
a life sentence and talking about how actually society judged him for that so
the issue between him and Antonio came about from some previous criminal
behavior that had happened before he went to prison.
Jessica hated him, not because of any other reason than the fact he wasn't
there when she was growing up and it really helped them to tackle the way
that society judges them for their convictions and continues to judge them
and also the difficulties being separated from their children for
example and our scriptwriter is incredibly talented and did say in an
interview that was in our programme that this really was a love letter to his
children and and I'd like to share with you just a short excerpt from the
prologue of our play which opened with Shylock stood there holding his bag of
belongings and at the door of the prison being released so we had two officers
who were actually releasing him and telling him that said his sentence was
he'd served his custodial sentence, he was being released now on a long term
life sentence and he stood there and spoke these words to the audience and I think
they're really powerful "Too many years have passed me by, too many losses made
me wonder why, to reflect on my actions and their
cost. Photos on a wall, reminders of all I'd lost. The price to pay far too high
yet I pay only the least part of it those left outside take the biggest hit
they suffer the most and they pay the real cost. Children's tears as they sit
on visits, each one a sad memory elicits Scar in my heart and searing my soul
Souvenir of my part in the sorrow that I've caused and a painful reminder to be
a better man, a better dad. A new start? I doubt it.
The baggage I carry sits heavy on my shoulders an invisible label more
apparent as I get older becoming seen by all and set apart I'm
now an ex con, a man with no future simply abandoned by the institutions
that placed this lodestone around my neck but for the sake of redemption I must. I
must resist the temptation to seek revenge or to walk the same path I once
did, instead I need to bask in the love that a child bears for their father
try harder, do better, go farther than those who go furthest to prove that I
deserve such a love. I must move forward no matter what the load and after what
burden is laid or title bestowed I shall begin anew and with this we invited our
audience to understand the world from Shylock's perspective - to understand
how it feels to be shunned and I think it really brought things to life and I
think through using Shakespeare it gives people an opportunity to draw on that
cultural capital to draw on those famous speeches and then we adapted for example
Shylock's famous speech about you know if you prick me do I not bleed and stood
there talking about that actually we still have more similarities than
differences as human beings and we've had a similar experience in HMP Stafford
where I started in February 2019 and where Emergency Shakespeare was founded
so that's a different dynamic all together, it's a different group of
people serving very different sentence lengths but again we've created a
community where everybody's voice is heard everybody has the opportunity to
bring Shakespeare to life and in that particular company we performed our
first production of Macbeth but brought right up-to-date into a modern
theatre company where unfortunately the actor was trying to make the lead actor
ill so he could take over from understudy and step up into the main
role, got the proportions wrong of this poison that he poured in his drink and
killed him off so our Macbeth actually started quite
unwillingly he didn't mean to kill someone but we really saw that come to
life and it was great to have the governor who's a huge advocate and
actually contacted me to start the theatre company there and playing a
cameo role and have officers involved and really to start to build some
some amazing bridges and again to challenge people's perceptions and to
have people talk about how their families were proud of them often for
the first time since they were incarcerated or since they'd been arrested for whatever
index offense they've committed so for me Shakespeare gives people that
opportunity to bring things to life and in both of those prisons and also
HMP Wakefield where I now work we're raring to go as soon as we can get back
in and so in the Gallowfield Players will soon be working on Sicker Acts of Storm
which is the story before The Tempest so it's what happened before that's sea
storm that we all know and love and in Emergency Shakespeare and Stafford we'll
be working on Othello so we just finished the Merry Wives of Windsor then we're
moving on to looking at Othello and issues of prejudice and racial hatred
and so on and it's just a way of giving people an opportunity to have a
voice and I think on that basis I'd really like to just finish off with some
words from one of the actors in the Gallowfield players who talks about
experiencing freedom within the high security estate. 'In a recent conversation
I was asked why would I want to attend a prison drama group, was it embarrassing
to stand up on stage and perform in front of people? I can only answer each
part of this inquiry in turn and firstly unless you ever attend the group it's
difficult perhaps even impossible to grasp the depth of feeling that's
attached to it by all involved. For a few short hours every week we are free
although physically we remain within the boundaries of the prison our spirits soar
far above the walls and fences, our minds are so involved in what we do that we could
be in any room on any stage anywhere in the world, this is a true sense of
freedom and one that's rarely found anywhere in life let alone within the
high-security estate, it offers each of us a few brief moments of nirvana. The
weekly group provides a safe and supportive space which we can express
ourselves, it is a space in which honesty exists
and the truth is not used as a weapon to beat us down but instead to empower to
encourage each and every one of us involved - we get the opportunity to be
occasionally irreverent without the fear of institutional retribution and our
combined coping mechanism of gallows humor is appreciated as humor not some
manifestation of criminal deviancy - our weekly sessions allow us to have an
opinion and a voice so that it can be heard - not all of our ideas are
achievable but in the group they're considered and this alone helps build
confidence and raise self-esteem - we are treated as equals as people and this is
often an alien concept within the penal system - upon crossing the threshold of
prison we instantly become less - we are stripped of our clothes, stripped of our
dignity, stripped of our humanity - our lives prior to incarceration instantly
rendered worthless - all of our experience our knowledge debased - however within the
setting of the Gallowfield players these trends are reversed - prison
standards turned on their head - the group is a cooperative endeavor this means
that all involved have a sense of ownership of it, at times a
possessiveness over this beautiful organism that grows in unexpected and
wondrous ways - it means there is a sense of responsibility bestowed on everyone
to act in a certain manner to be the best tools that we can be in order to
reap the rewards this initiative has to offer and with the ownership and
responsibility comes anxiety and self-doubt because it's valued so highly -
the pain of doing anything that would let others down is a side effect of the
benefits of the ownership and the camaraderie that we feel it's a small
price to pay. As for the second part of the question in prison are we not all
actors playing the part we need to depending on the setting we're in?
Offender management unit psychology expect one set of behaviors, survival on
the wing requires another - our family is another - workshops and education still
a different set and many cannot be themselves or they lose themselves in
the tangled web that the penal system weaves - for some an escapism from the
mind-numbing reality of prison life is in the characters played and even if
there's embarrassment of standing in front of your peers and acting a small
moment or two of discomfort's nothing when compared to the hours and hours of
pleasure experienced - all I can say is this is the closest thing to freedom
I've experienced in prison without being in the arms of my loved ones". I think
it's really important to hear the words spoken by some of the actors and it's
for that reason that and whilst we're out during the Covid crisis I've been
working really hard to send in activities for the actors and to get
them engaged so we're rehearsing remotely if that's possible and they're
behind their cell doors at the moment unfortunately to make sure that we can
keep the pandemic under some form of control in the prison system and it's
really challenging to be separated from them on such an ongoing basis but one of
the things we have been doing as I say is creating these activities that we
can all do together and that we can share and we even managed to rehearse to
edit a whole script while we've been separated but we've also been producing
packs and so collaboratively I've done a lot of the work that we've had
illustrations produced by some of the actors and we've also had activities
suggested by them and some reflections on the plays and those packs are
going back into every prison in England, Wales and Scotland and making things
available for people to use their creativity and we're pitching them at
three different levels so we've got pack one which is aimed at those who maybe
English isn't the first language or maybe literacy is an issue - a lot of the
responses are creative and we've got the middle pack, so pack two which is looking
at maybe people who can read a newspaper without any trouble and they're maybe
starting to do some written explorations of the stories and
narratives of Shakespeare and then pack three for those people who maybe are
more engaged with Shakespeare or want to be more engaged and actually want
something a little bit more intellectually challenging so there
we're using the play but we're then taking maybe some speeches, some scenes
out of that and actually getting them to write back to it or to translate it into
modern English - things that hopefully whilst they're behind their doors and
they're physically confined more than they've ever been
they're in a position where they can mentally free themselves and I think for
me that's what Shakespeare gives and it gives people the opportunity to say
whilst my physical restrictions and my physical incarceration would that be
actual and literal incarceration or if that be mentally because of mental
health challenges or because of learning disabilities or because of the
fact that I'm ostracized by society Shakespeare gives me a way to find my
voice, to build my resilience and to be the person that deep down inside I know
that I can be and I'm hoping that that's what Shakespeare Unbard brings to the
the men and women that I work with and that will continue to do so thank you
very much