Drama Games for Exploring Shakespeare

Frequently, tutors will be partway through delivering a drama session and realise it has not gone as expected. Someone hasn't turned up, we've been turfed out of our usual room, or the material just isn't landing in the way we had hoped or thought it would. It's in these panic-stricken, tea-guzzling, biscuit-refusing break times that Drama Games for Exploring Shakespeare comes into its own.

The slim volume implies that you might want to keep it in your back pocket for emergency situations, but I've been holding on to mine for dear life this week, thumbing the pages whenever I've been faced with a last-minute change and still the same mammoth goal to achieve.

The book is written by Alanna Beeken and Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation. They offer workshops and advice to school groups staging Shakespeare plays, as well as running one of the largest youth arts festivals in the world. Their experience in this area is vast, and they take games very seriously. Games underpin drama, and are an incredibly effective way of accessing Shakespeare. The exercises are split into chapters including language, character and staging, and every exercise comes with an indication of numbers, age and time required.

There is an acknowledgement at the beginning of the book that the author cannot claim sole authorship over the material included. You will have played some of the games before, but that's because great games persist. The best ones get traded by practitioners in the green rooms of theatres or school corridors, and are stolen and remodelled in the image of whoever is leading them on that particular day. I've been a practitioner for over 10 years, and I found plenty of new material here, plus the fact that the exercises are phrased so clearly that they immediately usurped my own notes – illegibly scrawled on the inside cover of a battered old copy of R&J.

Alanna Beeken and CSSF aren't necessarily the Condell and Heminges of their time – these exercises would not have been lost forever if she hadn't compiled this book – but Drama Games for Exploring Shakespeare is a useful companion to anyone working with young people and Shakespeare. Get one now and start passing it round the office.