Alan Read on Shakespeare Cliff
Alan Read, Professor of Theatre at King's College London, explores the 'dreadful trade' of Shakespeare Cliff in the first episode of a series about our relationship with cliffs.
Alan Read's starting point for his review of our relationship with cliffs, is his own vertigo. Vertigo for him is not associated with a fear of falling but rather a fear of the ground "coming up to meet me to embrace me, or to engulf me". It's not heights that worry him but proximity. So he has never been to Shakespeare Cliff in Dover but he knows it well from the play King Lear. He recalls the scene where Gloucester, having had his eyes gouged out, begs a man who he thinks to be poor mad Tom, but is instead his own son Edgar, to lead him to the edge of the cliff at Dover. Edgar leads his father, but not to the edge. Instead he imagines the cliff. He describes a cliff, and on this cliff he describes the rock samphire collectors as they move across the cliff gathering this plant - "a dreadful trade". Imagining this scene, Alan says "Here a graph has been drawn, a sequence of points on a grid with two axes, of cliff and beach, joined by a line that describes, in the form of a gradient angle, the nature of trade, dreadful trade indeed" Shakespeare would not have been familiar with graphs. The term wasn't in use until the 1800s. One of the pioneers of cinematography Etiennne-Jules Marey "certainly thought graphs to be the 'universal language' of the future". Today graphs are ubiquitous. For example, we have the fiscal cliff which describes our economies. As Alan reflects on this, he is drawn back to Shakespeare Cliff: "Creatures it would seem, do not thrive on the cliff. It is samphire that grows so well there, and might be left in peace. Dreadful trade."
Actors are David Acton and Sam Dale.
Additional sound recordings by Chris Watson.
Producer: Sarah Blunt
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Professor Alan Read
In the 1990s he worked as a freelance writer in Barcelona and was Director of Talks at the in London, and from 1997-2006 he was Professor of Theatre at where he directed a five year -funded programme on performance, architecture and location exploring theatre and public ceremonial in rational housing blocks and council estates called the .
He is a member of the which he runs with his two performance colleagues in the Kings College English Department, Dr Lara Shalson and Dr Kelina Gotman.
Professor Read has also written an essay about . In this work he considers the room in which he imagines a listener is sitting, and then the listener's relationship to the space in which they are sitting; the floor and the four walls. He then suggests the listener imagines what the room would be like if a wall is removed. The room is then transformed into a stage; a theatrical space.
David Acton
His other work includes: The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre; Anjin: The Shogun and the Samurai in Tokyo and Sadler’s Wells, television programmes such as Diaries of the Great War, Doctors, EastEnders, Silent Witness, Hollyoaks and the films After Death, Volume and Persuasion.
Sam Dale
His professional career began in Theatre-in-Education for Brian Way's 'Theatre Centre', then he went on to Street Theatre in London with Ed Berman's Dogg's Troupe.
From these beginnings, Sam has worked extensively in theatre on productions such as The White Devil at Contact Theatre, Manchester, The Seagull - Jackal Productions, Says I Says He - Sheffield Crucible and Mickery Amsterdam.
His television work includes Chips With Everything, Accident of Class and Death, Rock Follies among many others and he was in the BFI film Brothers and Sisters, directed by Richard Wooley.
Broadcasts
- Mon 9 Feb 2015 13:45Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4
- Tue 5 Jan 2021 23:30Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4
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