Annie Eddington’s Shakespeare Drama Workshop – Jun 2026

Last week we hosted a Drama workshop lead by external facilitator Annie Eddington for some of our Year 7 and 8 Scholarship and Enrichment students. 

Annie secured an MA in the Contemporary Practice of Shakespeare at the University of Essex where she went on to teach Drama undergraduates, whilst building a freelance career as a facilitator. She now freelances full time, working on numerous projects for many theatres including the National Theatre, the New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich, The Mercury Colchester, and the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds. 

A familiar face in School, we were delighted to welcome Annie into School, working through language, interpretation, movement and many other aspects of Shakespeare’s work, focusing specifically on The Comedy of Errors, this year’s Shakespeare on the Lawn production. 

Year 7’s Millar explained more about the workshop and his thoughts on the day. 

“If I say The Comedy of Errors, what do you think of?  Maybe twins?  Mistaken identities?  This was how Annie started our Shakespeare workshop.  

After some physical warm-ups and exploration of the imagery in the play, including throwing Shakespearean insults at one another, we worked on blocking a boxing match in slow motion, where we couldn’t touch each other.  After this, we were given a scene from The Comedy of Errors and in pairs or threes we worked on blocking it, making a silent movie of the scene. This all led up to performing a full scene from the play in bigger groups, with one director in each group.   

The day was a great experience – Annie was really good fun and made the workshop really entertaining.  My favourite bit was making the silent movie, because we learned how to use a rope in lots of different ways as a prop to bring our scene to life.  

I can’t wait to watch the Year 9 performance of The Comedy of Errors next week, and I am very grateful for having the opportunity Annie gave us to understand it better.”