On this two-week, four-credit international seminar, students will spend a week each in London, England, and Edinburgh, Scotland, seeing the world’s best plays and musicals and learning how these productions are made—from page to stage—through backstage tours, interviews with the artists, and morning discussions over tea or cappuccino. To prepare for the trip, students will read short essays by some of the world’s top playwrights, directors, actors and designers. Those readings will guide the viewing of at least twelve memorable performances—some of which will be world premieres—and a production at Shakespeare’s Globe.
We begin our sojourn with a week-long stay in in London, ancient city and world center of the arts, culture, history and thought. Then we’ll move on for a week in the heart of Edinburgh, Scotland, which will coincide with the Edinburgh Festival, the largest arts festival in the world. (Edinburgh, said the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, is what Paris ought to be.)
Students may add a two-credit independent study in creative writing (Writing the City) or some other subject (at additional cost). Writing the City uses the artistic, cultural and historic assets of London and Edinburgh as material for the composition of original works in poetry, prose or scripts, according to student preference. (See Molly Elias’s travel writing, which she composed for this independent study, on her bog, “Clear Eyes Full Passport.”)
HOW TO APPLY: You can find more information and the application at the Global Education British Theatre Seminar page here, and you can fill out an application on that site (scroll down to “online application.”) The deadline for the 2025 trip/course is January 20, 2025. (Below is an outdated flyer for perusal.)
Daily Itinerary:
We depart from Logan International Airport in Boston in early August (August 1 in 2025).
Classes will take place most mornings. From lunchtime until the evening performance students are free to visit the cities’ historical and cultural attractions. Optional group tours of various sites will also be offered.
Week One: London
After our Friday flight, we’ll have Saturday through the next Saturday morning in “our own” flats at King’s College, a five-minute walk from the Thames River, the London Eye, and the National Theatre complex. Besides attending plays at all three of the RNT theatres, and catching a show as groundings at Shakespeare’s Globe, we can visit museums such as the Tate Britain, the Tate Modern, the British Museum, the Museum of London, the National Gallery, and the V&A.
Week Two: Edinburgh
Saturday through Saturday. We’ll train up the British eastern coast to Edinburgh, capitol of Scotland, for a week-long stay in our own flats at the University of Edinburgh, just a brisk walk from the Royal Mile that connects The Edinburgh Castle at upper end with the Palace of Holyroodhouse at the lower. (“Rood,” by the way, is an old-time word for the cross.) The Edinburgh Fringe Festival will be under way and will feature thousands of events, hordes of street performers, and the fabled Military Tattoo at the Castle.
Playwrights Whose Work We’re Likely to See: Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Martin McDonagh, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Patrick Marber, Mike Leigh, John Guare, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, etc.
Authors to be Read: Peter Brook, David Mamet, Tennessee Williams, Konstantin Stanislavski, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Shaffer, Peter Hall, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Christopher Fry, Jeffrey Sweet, Ming Cho Lee, Norm Jones, etc.
Places to be Visited: London’s Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Covent Garden, Charles Dickens House, The Tower of London; Edinburgh Castle, Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Sir Walter Scott Monument, John Knox House & Scottish Storytelling Centre, Arthur’s Seat, Lauriston Castle, etc.
Some Premieres and Revivals Seen on Previous Trips that have Transferred to Broadway & Film: Standing at the Sky’s Edge (Olivier Award), The 39 Steps (Tony nominee, Olivier Award), Rock ‘n’ Roll (Tony nominee), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (Obie Award, Tony nominee), The History Boys (Tony Award), The Real Thing (Tony Award), Tales from Hollywood (Tony nominee), The Cripple of Inishmaan (Olivier Award), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (Tony nominee), Closer (Tony nominee, Olivier Award), Copenhagen (Tony Award), Les Liaisons Dangerous (Tony nominee), Lettice and Lovage (Tony nominee), Arcadia (Tony nominee, Olivier Award), Art (Tony nominee), Not About Nightingales (Tony nominee), The Invention of Love (Tony nominee, Evening Standard Award), Vincent in Brixton (Tony nominee, Olivier Award), Blue/Orange (Olivier Award), Goodnight Children Everywhere (Olivier Award), The Weir (Olivier Award), Betrayal (Olivier Award), The Designated Mourner, The Shape of Things, The American Pilot, Jerry Springer: the Opera, The Lion King.
Since we launched the UK Theatre course in 1995, we’ve traveled with more than 400 Anglonauts.
In years of yore, we traveled right after commencement, and our sometimes chilly itinerary included places like Dublin and Galway, and, in England, Bath (with its Royal Crescent and Pulteney Bridge—twin to the Ponte Vecchio in Florence), Stratford-Upon-Avon (home to three very different theatres and to the Bard’s crypt), Oxford (with a cooling pause at the Inklings’ Eagle & Child pub), and Cambridge (there to savor an evensong at King’s College Chapel)—and, always, London. Day trips have taken us to Salisbury (tallest cathedral spire in the UK—at 404 feet) and nearby Stonehenge (big gray stones; little red poppies), to Ely (named for its eels, and home for a decade to Oliver Cromwell), to Coventry (with its massive Graham Sutherland tapestry behind the altar of the 1962 cathedral, itself verging on the ruins of the Nazi-bombed 14th-century cathedral), and, in Ireland, to the Aran Islands, to James Joyce’s tower in Sandycove, to Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery (chaste resting place for the 19th century’s greatest English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins), and to the village of Kinvara, where Dawn and John Sarrouf got engaged and began scheming up Elijah and Esme Sarrouf.
In 2004 we switched to an August trip that included a week in Edinburgh to take advantage of the thousands of theatre, dance, music, spoken word, and nearly unclassifiable performances in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival. There we see as many events as we can in one week: Jeff Miller manages three shows a day on most days (when he’s not supine in Princes Street Gardens). In the lee of the Castle of Edinburgh another engagement occurred, Norm and Jean’s, and soon after that spot was memorialized in a painting.
We’ve honed our approach, so we can offer a lot of culture for a little green. Classes occur in the morning, usually with a white coffee, often in one of the several lobbies of London’s Royal National Theatre, or in an atrium at the foot of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. Students live in flats-with-kitchens in the hearts of these two capitols, and the afternoons are free for museum-going, Beefeater-watching, punting, shopping, picnicking—all of which are endeavored. Evenings find us in the front rows of the UK’s best theatres, in the living presence of the English-speaking world’s great actors—Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, Mark Rylance and Maggie Smith, Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw, Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon—and some terrific young actors, too, whose performances mark them as tomorrow’s stars.
Trip co-creator and guest prof John Sarrouf adds: “We’ve written poems in the graveyard on the Avon-thru-Stratford; quaffed with casts at the Dirty Duck; sketched the courtyards of Kenilworth and Warwick Castles; interviewed WWII vets at Lewis’ house, The Kilns; candle dipped at Tintern Abbey; haunted open air markets in Portobello, Cornwall and Penzance; twirled late night pasta Bolognese at Denise’s Restaurant. We were in a West End theatre when John Gielgud died, and the lights were dimmed, and actors came on stage after the show to tell stories of his work and influence. We sat next to Tom Stoppard for the first preview of the revival of The Real Thing, which went on to win the Olivier and the Tony that year. We saw the Shape of Things, and History Boys, and Closer, and The Designated Mourner, and August: Osage County before they became movies.”
The two-week trip is a crucible of culture and conversation, one that inspires the leaders for another year of making art, and impresses some life memories into the still-soft sensibilities of the students.
Ars Creative Writing 