I’m Josh Freedman, a second-year English BA student who worked as a Collaborative Research Intern on Dr Ella Hawkins’ project titled “Design, Contemporaneity, and Relevance on the Shakespearean Stage.“
I applied for the Collaborative Research Internship pretty much as soon as the form was released. Dr Ella Hawkins had told me about her project, ‘Design, Contemporaneity, and Relevance on the Shakespearean Stage’, in a seminar at the beginning of Semester 2 and it instantly piqued my interest. Shakespeare has always been one of my keenest academic passions – one of the reasons why I came to the University of Birmingham was the Shakespeare Institute, and the geographical proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon more generally. With this in mind, I had been keeping an eye out for examples of productions which used costume and set design to reference real-world events for a good few months by the time it actually came to applying for the internship. I went to see the RSC’s The Tempest in February 2023 (which uses junk as props and as part of costumes to comment on the climate crisis), and in March I saw The Merchant of Venice 1936 at my local Watford Palace Theatre. I thought both of these productions fit in with what I’d been told about the project, so kept them in the back of my mind.
When I started on the project, Dr Hawkins gave me a lot of freedom to see where my research interests took me, so I decided to focus on the Merchant production in my research. Just to briefly explain the production’s premise: it brings Shakespeare’s play into the East End of London in the 1930s, a period of rising antisemitism under the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and their leader Oswald Mosley, whose face is projected ominously onto the set. Tracy‑Ann Oberman is Jewish herself, and brings an authenticity to her gender-flipped Shylock.
My research, then, really centred around this production. As it is still touring, there isn’t much in the way of archive material to use in my research, so I had to be a bit more resourceful: I had kept the programme from when I saw the play, and the production’s website has a handy photo gallery. The use of costume in this production makes the antisemitism feel more immediate; Shylock’s fur-lined coats hint at her wealthy status, and the merchant Antonio is dressed in the Nazi-esque black shirt and red armband of a BUF member.
My main work for the internship was interviewing the play’s director, Brigid Larmour. It took a while to organise, as she was working abroad for a few weeks, but I came up with a list of questions, which I ran by Dr Hawkins, and was good to go. I asked her about the production in general, the moments when it departed from Shakespeare’s original, the use of costume of course, and the decision to use cross-gendered casting. It was a really rewarding experience, and the absolute highlight of the internship.
Overall, I’ve learned a lot from this internship. The research experience has really set me up for third year, and possible postgraduate study (I’m hoping to do a Shakespeare MA after graduating). I’ve had to really hone my time management skills. The whole experience was very self-guided, so I had to keep reminding myself, particularly before the interview was organised, that gathering material, and even thinking and reading, was still work! I have been really lucky to get such an in-depth knowledge of a specific production – I am now an expert in The Merchant of Venice 1936. It’s coming to the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford this September-October, and again in January-February 2024. Get tickets, I can vouch for this production, and I will be taking all my friends… I’m going to be infuriating!
Josh Freedman, English BA