Thy eternal summer shall not fade …

With productions of Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Romeo and Juliet running at London's Barbican until 19 January, the RSC has now also announced its Summer season 2019, with shows from February to September.

Productions will include As You Like It, directed by Kimberly Sykes, Measure for Measure directed by Gregory Doran, and The Taming of the Shrew directed by Justin Audibert. The latter is to be set in a reimagined 1590 where England is a matriarchy, so audiences can expect a challenge to the conventional gender and power dynamics present in the play.

All productions are now available for public booking, and teacher packs and other resources are available for each play on the production webpage.

For more information go to rsc.org.uk

My griefs cry louder than advertisement …

Irish theatre company Dead Centre has produced a new play entitled Hamnet – a solo show for an 11-year-old child actor. The play explores the character of Shakespeare's own son, who died in 1596, around three years before the bard began to write the grief-filled play which nearly bears his name. With a tour that takes in Brisbane Festival before journeying round Australia and later Europe, this would be an interesting production to keep an eye out for – not least because there might, once a script is published, be some excellent material for your Year 7 students to get their teeth into.

God hath given you one face and you make yourself another …

The Times Educational Supplement has recently reported on successful use of emojis in the teaching of Shakespeare, with the little colourful icons being used to help students understand plot and character. One teacher explained that having been through each scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream she would ask students to summarise the scene using two emojis, and then explain their choices.

While obviously fun, and unusual – and probably from the student's perspective seemingly subversive, emojis being so much a part of youth culture; they were designed to express tone or emotion in a non-visual, nuance-light medium (the text message). Surely Drama must be an even better and far more appropriate way to carry out the same exercise?!

Perhaps some drama teachers might be encouraged to suggest that students might make the faces represented by emojis themselves – thereby engaging with the subject and emotion of a Shakespeare scene through performance – which is after all what it was written for…

Here pitch our tents, even here in Bosworth field …

Hinkley and Bosworth Borough Council has agreed planning permission for a £26 million test-driving site to be built for driverless cars on part of the site of the Battle of Bosworth. To the dismay of heritage campaigners, as reported in the Telegraph, ‘the move to allow cars to be tested at speeds approaching 155mph on the site where Richard III was defeated by Henry Tudor in 1485 was backed by 12 votes to five.’

As it happens, King Richard himself might have been relieved by the presence of extra available transport…though ‘My kingdom for a Horiba Mira driverless car’ doesn't have quite the same ring to it…