Ben Crystal
Ben Crystal is the artistic director of Passion in Practice and its Shakespeare Ensemble, and was the co-writer of Shakespeare’s Words and The Shakespeare Miscellany with his father David Crystal, who is also attending the 2016 Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. His first solo book, Shakespeare on Toast – Getting a Taste for the Bard, in 2008, was shortlisted for the 2010 Educational Writer of the Year Award.
A quartet series for Arden Shakespeare/ Bloomsbury – Springboard Shakespeare was published June 2013; You Say Potato: A Book about Accents September 2014, and An Illustrated Dictionary of Shakespeare was published April 2015 with OUP.
His theatre productions of Simon Stephens’ One Minute in 2008 and Robin French’s Gilbert is Dead in 2009 were critically acclaimed, and in 2011 he played Hamlet in the first Original Pronunciation production for 400 years, co-producing with the Nevada Repertory Company.
In 2012, he was the curator, producer and creative director of the first CD of extracts of Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation for the British Library, their bestselling CD to date.
Crystal gives workshops on performing Shakespeare around the world, and some of this work can be viewed at www.passioninpractice.com
He lives in London.
Website: http://www.bencrystal.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bencrystal
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ben-Crystal/186872328003064?fref=ts
