I realized that I had never fully appreciated the impact that Shakespeare’s plays can make on an audience - Michael Collins, Member Overseas

One evening in July 1984, while I was alone in London, waiting for my wife and daughter to arrive the next morning from Washington, DC, I discovered that an RSC production of Measure for Measure was on at the Barbican. I had written a paper on the play in graduate school, and I thought I would go to see how it worked on the stage. I enjoyed the production as it went along, but, in the last act, it made a profound and lasting impact upon me. After Mariana had asked Isabella to intercede for Angelo, Juliet Stevenson, playing Isabella, turned and moved upstage as if to exit. But then, after a few steps, she paused, turned, paused again, and then walked all the way down the deep stage to kneel before the Duke and plead for Angelo. It was a beautiful, powerful, and moving event on the stage, a miraculous moment of generosity and forgiveness. Although I had read, studied, and written about them, I realized that evening that I had never fully understood or appreciated the impact that Shakespeare’s plays can make on an audience, the feelings of joy or sorrow they can evoke. I set out to learn as much as I could about acting, directing, and performance, about the ways in which a play by Shakespeare is brought to life on the stage by a director and a company of actors. I went on to teach my students, as best I could in a classroom, how the plays might work on the stage and how they might speak to us through their staging. That production of Measure for Measure by the Royal Shakespeare Company changed forever my way of teaching Shakespeare. But it also opened up for me a deeply rewarding interest in the performance of Shakespeare’s plays—one that has given me great pleasure now for close to forty years.