Exhibition: Shakespeare at the OU

In the 1960s Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced his vision of wider recruitment to university education, to be enabled by the foundation of a ‘University of the Air.’ This bold enterprise was rapidly implemented, and by the end of the decade the Open University was founded. Many of its teaching materials were produced in collaboration with the BBC and were broadcast on both television and radio.

This genesis of the Open University perhaps accounts in part for the emphasis in all its teaching of drama on the importance of the fact that a play-text is normally a text designed for performance. With the advent of video-cassettes, CDs and DVDs the stress on the visual and aural elements of drama became ever more practicable even for a university devoted to distance learning.

The Open University continues its productive association with the BBC with prestigious series such as ‘Coast’, but the prescribed teaching materials are now distributed individually to students. The new technologies, as they then were, have been used in various ways: to make available performances of entire plays, to show techniques of warm-up exercises for actors and rehearsal strategies, and as a platform both for formal lectures and for discussions and exchanges between scholars, critics, and directors and actors from the worlds of theatre and of screen. Now the Internet is exploited in many ways to support the teaching of the Open University.

Above all, perhaps, in drama-related modules, the Open University materials explore how the same text can give rise to a great variety of interpretations in performance.

The earliest broadcasts, now half a century old, sometimes seem quaintly dated, but their content is still of value. Some of the latest DVDs, on the other hand, explore the cutting edge of recent innovative approaches to Shakespeare’s art.