On-Demand Webinar | Directing Shakespeare: Sir Jonathan Bate In Conversation with Arin Arbus

Available to watch from Friday 10th April

In this exclusive webinar from Digital Theatre+, world-renowned Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate and Arin Arbus (Artistic Director, Theatre for a New Audience) discuss what it means to 'direct Shakespeare', including:

How scholarly editions and knowledge of Shakespeare's texts can affect interpretative choices in a production
How small editorial choices can have large theatrical consequences (with real theatre examples)
Effective ways to engage today's undergraduates studying Shakespeare's canon

This webinar will be available on-demand. Sign up today to receive instant access on Friday 10th April.

Please note: This webinar is designed to give Higher Education educators new ways to think about (and teach) the works of Shakespeare. This discussion may still be relevant for educators at the High School level.

Sir Jonathan Bate

Sir Jonathan Bate is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, where he was formerly Provost of Worcester College.

He is the author of twenty books, including prizewinning biographies of Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, John Clare and Ted Hughes. He has been on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company and edited their editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works and Collaborative Plays.

Being Shakespeare, his one-man play for Simon Callow, premiered at the Edinburgh Festival toured the United Kingdom, had three runs in London’s West End, and played in New York, Chicago and Trieste. His most recent book is a memoir called Mad about Shakespeare.

Arin Arbus

Arin Arbus became the Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) in September 2025. TFANA is an award-winning modern classical theatre in downtown Brooklyn dedicated to developing and revitalizing the performance and study of Shakespeare and other great dramatic works. By presenting Shakespeare alongside today’s boldest voices, TFANA engages audiences in a civic dialogue that spans centuries—expanding the definition of “classical” and shaping the canon of the future.

Arbus has directed productions and taught at Yale School of Drama, Juilliard, NYU Graduate Acting, Columbia University, Fordham University, The New School, and Brooklyn College. She is deeply invested in nurturing the next generation of theatre-makers and theatregoers.

Her honors include a Drama League Directing Fellowship, a Princess Grace Award, the Samuel H. Scripps Award, and membership in Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab.

Arbus has a long association with TFANA, having served as its first Associate Artistic Director from 2007 to 2017. Her directing work for TFANA includes Denis Johnson’s Des Moines; Waiting for Godot, starring Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks; The Merchant of Venice, with John Douglas Thompson as Shylock (also produced by The Shakespeare Theatre of DC and the Royal Lyceum Theatre of Edinburgh); The Winter’s Tale; The Skin of Our Teeth (Obie Award); King Lear; repertory productions of Strindberg’s The Father and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; Much Ado About Nothing; The Taming of the Shrew; Macbeth; Measure for Measure; and Othello.

In 2019, Arbus made her Broadway debut directing Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, starring six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald and two-time Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon. The production received a Tony Award nomination for Best Revival.

Additional credits include the world premiere of Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound for Clubbed Thumb, later remounted at The Public Theater, and Ben Power and Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy at Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Guthrie Theater.

For Houston Grand Opera, Arbus has directed Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and La Traviata, the latter also staged at Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Canadian Opera Company, earning eight Dora Award nominations.

Committed to socially engaged work, Arbus spent several years making theatre with incarcerated individuals at a medium-security prison in upstate New York through Rehabilitation Through the Arts. In 2018, she directed an Arabic-language adaptation of The Tempest, performed by refugees in a camp in Greece for the Campfire Project.