ABSTRACT

As a director and actor Tina Packer synergizes practice and scholarship. For years she has shared a series of Socratic discussion-cum-lectures during the various Shakespeare & Company Training Intensives, and this chapter is the first of three written versions of such talks in this book. Stylistically they give a flavor of her ‘voice,’ combining the vernacular and the intellectual, and sometimes ‘shaping’ history a little to render a vigorous story – exactly as Shakespeare did. In a lively canter through Western theatre history, she elucidates humankind’s need to tell stories and make sense of the universe, to bond in a collective act (as actors and witnesses), and to heal and/or change society. She traverses Greek and Roman theatre, and the English Church’s role in early playmaking. She navigates the Elizabethan playhouse’s reconfiguration of Greek ‘acoustical chambers’ to enable words to vibrate within the audience and arouse potent debate. And she introduces three key questions running through Shakespeare & Company’s work: ‘What does it mean to be a human being? How shall we act? What must I do?’ Packer ends with a call to action for contemporary theatre makers to invigorate theatre’s function locally and globally.