Book review: The Drama Workshop Leader

Linden Walcott-Burton is an extremely knowledgeable workshop facilitator with years of experience across some of the country's most prestigious acting schools and artistic venues. This book is therefore an excellent guide for anyone wanting to run and develop workshops, because Linden's approach is not only thorough, but very caring. Whether you are experienced as a workshop leader or not, I think you'd be hard pressed not to learn something from this book making your experience, and that of your students, better.

The chapters in this book are big, but there's a reason for that. They provide a huge amount of detail. Each chapter is subdivided into smaller sections, but essentially, they are: 1. Your Workshop; 2. Your Group; 3. Specific Workshops; 4. Yourself as a Workshop Leader.

Chapter 1 for me was the most useful in terms of actually planning and thinking about the structure of the workshop that you might be running. It covers the basics of planning your own workshop, how it should be structured and some really helpful tables (I love a good table!) on specific workshop plans, such as the organization of a whole day workshop, a Shakespeare specific workshop, timings and transitions, games and links between content. It's so through and practical, this is the chapter that I think I would be coming back to each time I was planning a workshop. The other chapters can be more philosophical at times, whereas chapter 1 is functional.

This is a very detailed book. Every aspect of leading a workshop is covered. It doesn't only ask you to consider the content and structure of your workshop, but delves into group dynamics, behaviour management, accessibility, and what type of workshop leader you want to be.

There are also details of the games that are suggested, plus fun variations so that you can use a familiar game in a new way and link it to the theme of your workshop. There seems genuine care and attention for not only getting the most out of the participants in terms of outcome, but there is thought and experience of how to get to know your students as people first, so that you can build trust and develop really great work.

It's unsurprising that there's a whole section of thank you's from students about Linden's workshops. This book is a reflection of his evident expertise and it could help you to be a great facilitator too.