Shakespearean Residency with Ben Crystal Noted Actor, Author, Producer

In conjunction with Love's Labors Lost, Crystal will be doing a residency at W&L with the cast, October 18-26.

Crystal is the artistic director of Passion in Practice and its Shakespeare Ensemble, and was the co-writer of Shakespeare’s Words (Penguin 2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (Penguin 2005) with his father David Crystal. His first solo book, Shakespeare on Toast – Getting a Taste for the Bard (Icon 2008) was shortlisted for the 2010 Educational Writer of the Year Award. 

A quartet series for Arden Shakespeare / Bloomsbury - Springboard Shakespeare was published June 2013, You Say Potato: A Book about Accents September 2014, and An Illustrated Dictionary of Shakespeare was published April 2015 with OUP. 

His theater productions of Simon Stephens' One Minute in 2008 and Robin French's Gilbert is Dead in 2009 were critically acclaimed, and in 2011 he played Hamlet in the first Original Pronunciation production for 400 years, with the Nevada Repertory Company. 

In 2012 he was the curator, producer and creative director of the first CD of extracts of Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation for the British Library, their best-selling CD to date. In 2014 he gave the English Council Lecture at the British Council on Speaking the bright and beautiful English of Shakespeare.

In March 2015 he consulted with Baltimore Shakespeare on their OP Merchant of Venice, and created an OP Lab in a three day workshop and performance at the Pearl Theatre with the Shakespeare Society in NYC. 

With his Shakespeare Ensemble, he has recently restaged their Globe staged-reading of Macbeth in OP in a London loft, and mounted a production of Pericles in OP at Daniel Harding’s Interplay Festival at the Berwaldhallen in Stockholm, underscored by Max Richter’s Four Seasons: Recomposed, played live by the Trondheim Soloists with violinist Daniel Hope. 

In July 2015, following on from 2014’s series of OP events at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Shakespeare Ensemble will give a cue-script rehearsed, candle-lit staged reading of Henry V in original pronunciation, before taking the production on tour. 

He gives workshops on performing Shakespeare around the world, and some of this work can be viewed at www.passioninpractice.com

He lives in London and Tweets from @bencrystal