| Precis |
Each week, at various locations around New York City, groups of elderly people - male and female, rich and poor - meet to read Shakespeare together. The sessions are led by sixty-one year old Bob Smith, a man who says that his own life has been 'rescued' by the great English poet and playwright. He says he's passing on to the elderly his realisation that Shakespeare's words can help them understand and live with the complexities of loss, guilt and grief. The Bard, he believes, 'says it exactly as old people feel, only better, much better.' |
| Description |
This will be a programme both about Bob Smith and about the elderly New Yorkers he works with. Smith's own relationship to Shakespeare is a remarkable story. His childhood was dominated by having a severely mentally handicapped younger sister, whom his parents couldn't cope with. A lonely, unloved, child, Smith discovered Shakespeare at the age of ten and has 'lent' on him ever since. He's long knows all the plays by heart. He's worked as an actor's dresser at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut ; as a painter ; as a Shakespeare trainer ; and as a director of college productions. But it's his recent work with the elderly in New York that's finally allowed him to express with others what Shakespeare has done for him. 'In Shakespeare', he says, 'there are so many spectres and resurrections, so much haunting from the past.' In their seventies and eighties, usually reading Shakespeare for the first time, his 'students' discover words and scenarios that allow them to speak for the first time about the loss of a child, a long-standing enmity or a denied love. |