Description
The Cold Read Series – Number 1 – John Galsworthy
The concept –
The Cold Read Series offers actors the opportunity of a whole day workshop, exploring a text by a well known playwright, which they may not previously have read, or seen performed.
The catch is – you will know will the writer is, but you won’t know which play we are reading, until the workshop commences.
Casting will be done by a random ‘draw’, so you could be playing anyone! Perhaps a character totally outside of your ‘normal’ casting profile – giving you the opportunity to really ‘play’!
It will be a ‘cold read’ – something which actors can still be asked to do, at audition.
In the morning, we will read through the selected script, copies provided, and in the afternoon, we will discuss the work, its relevance to today – then return to selected scenes to ‘play’ with them further, on our feet.
John Galsworthy – the Playwright
John Galsworthy is best known nowadays, as a novelist, for ‘The Forsyte Saga’, and editions of his novels still remain in print.
However, in his lifetime, he was better known as a radical playwright, with his first play ‘The Silver Box’ (1906) being staged at the Royal Court Theatre. Many of his subsequent 27 plays, had West End / Manchester (produced by Annie Horniman) runs. He was a contemporary, and friend, of George Bernard Shaw, and Joseph Conrad, amongst others.
His plays often have a strong social message – he campaigned arduously for social justice, the rights of women, animal welfare, prison reform, against jingoism – and against censorship in theatre, alongside Granville-Barker (who was also one of his producers), Pinero and WE Gilbert.
I think the most recent professional production of one of his plays, was ‘The Mob’ (1914) a play about a pacifist politician, which was revived by The Orange Tree Theatre, directed by Sam Walters, in 2003 .
“Galsworthy takes his place in modern literature chiefly by virtue of his plays…most searching critics cannot leave him anything less than a great playwright”
Sheila Kaye Smith
He was the second author to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature, in the English Language.
The Workshop Director – Fiona Branson
As a professional theatre director, I have directed and devised plays for a range of companies, which have toured the UK and overseas, mainly for schools, colleges, rural touring and small/middle scale venues. I have taught at Bristol University Film & TV Dept., and am a graduate of Reading University Film & TV Dept.
As an actor, I appeared recently in ‘The Manningtree Witches’ by Ava Pickett at Colchester Mercury, and have TV credits including ‘Eastenders’; ‘Silent Witness’ and ‘Doctors’.
I love finding, and researching, plays I’ve never read before, and delight in ‘doing all the voices’. I hope this workshop gives you the opportunity to ‘play’, as actors, too, in the truest sense of the word, and perhaps discover lost theatrical gems….
The Players –
There will be space for a maximum of 14 participants in this workshop. Please come prepared for a gentle warm-up at the start of the day – and ready to ‘play’!
