This week we will have another brilliant comedy workshop with Roger. Roger had brought with him a variety of comedy books and biographical books including Tommy Cooper and Spike Milligan. Roger invited us to debate what types of comedy particular comedians focused on. Examples included slap-stick, paradying, innuendos.

Following Roger, Adam led his first Shakespeare work shop and intorduced us all to Othello and talked abit about the play and the plot, and characters. The plot essentially involves a charcter called Iago trying set up Othello because he go passed over for promotion. We read through the first two scenes and immediatley got a feel for what Iago was up to. We will continue to look at the play abit further.

This week we had a very informative work shop on Shakespeare lead by Shelly. This week we continued examing phrases used in all of Shakespeare's plays. Last time we looked at phrases in the English modern language which come from Shakespeare and are used in every day life. Examples include "One fell swoop", "Wild goose chase", and "Seen better days". It surprising just how much is from Shakespeare.

Our workshop today looked at phrases attributed to Shakespeare, but are not actually his own. Examples included
"Et tu, Brute? ", "Laughing stock", "The dog will have his day", "Out of the question", "The Naked Truth" and more.

Again it was surprising what people thought was Shakespeare's own phrases. However, as we all do today, Shakespeare used the popular sayings of the day.

In the second half, we had Matt lead us in a Script Writing and Consequences workshop. We were divided into to two groups of five. Each group were given five characters, five props, five locations. Using these each group had to make a script an try to incorporate everything. It was very hard to do but also humerous. We had notable impressions of The Doctor, Darth Vader, The Archbishop of Canterbury, and more. The Doctor got caught in a hurricane and Lord Vader was attending council meeting and apologising for his Star Destroyer miss firing and causing a big hole in The Leas in Folkestone. The captain of the ship was not so lucky.

We will be taking part in another Shakespeare workshop this week. We will be reading through another piece of work by Shakespeare and also act part of it out. So far we have looked at the following plays; Twelfth Night, The Taming Of The Shrew, and also A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Find out more about Shakespeares plays here >>

In today's workshop we also looked at a selection of phrases used in today's english language which were coined by Shakespeare. Such phrases included "Forgone Conclusion" (MacBeth), "Full Circle" (King Lear), "Good Riddance" (Trolus & Cressiola), "Seen Better Days" (As You Like It), "Laid with a trowl" (As you like it) ,"Blinking Idiot" (Merchant Of Venice), and "Eaten out of house and home" (Henry IV)

In the second half of the work shop we had a poetry workshop were we read Wildred Owens "DULCE ET DECORUM EST" and other peoms by Carol Ann Duffy.