Two of our greatest actors want to revive our passion for the Bard in the age of TikTok. Here’s how
Both actors see As You Like It as an opportunity to blow the dust off a sacred text. Walter believes that one reason so many people find Shakespeare daunting is that they are often introduced to his work in the wrong way at school. (That was certainly my own experience in the classroom at my comprehensive, where drama was reduced to a dreary checklist of metaphors, onomatopoeia and so on.)
“That’s what they often do,” laments Walter, 74, who recalls that her own experience of learning Shakespeare at Cranborne Chase, a boarding school in Dorset, was less than inspirational. “What they always do is go around the classroom and nobody can read it properly. We mustn’t underestimate the excitement of being in the presence of people pretending to be someone else and creating a forest that isn’t really there.”…
