Site-Specific Shakespeare

From ruined convents to rooftop gardens, parking lots to Zoom calls, theatre practitioners around the world are staging Shakespeare in a variety of unconventional and unexpected spaces. Drawing on practitioner interviews, case studies, and ten years of personal experience, this Element argues site-specific theatre-makers leverage 'tactical intelligence' in Shakespeare performance: a capacity for theatrical meaning-making through creative responses to spatial constraints, rather than strategic control. Organised around a heuristic of five types of 'site'– Revenant, Found, Shifting, Green, and Viral – with a conclusion that examines the challenges facing 'Future Sites' – the Element reveals a 'Guerrilla Shakespeare' in global site-specific performance. This is Shakespeare with a 'punk', 'pirate', 'bodega' spirit, where economic precarity is met with creative freedom and institutional barriers yield to democratic accessibility.