A woman with curly blonde hair wearing glasses on her head and a blue shirt with a 'Shakespeare Company' logo, gesturing with her hand as if explaining something.

“Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.”

Tina Packer’s ground-breaking approach to performing, directing, and teaching Shakespeare has made her company among the most vibrant and enduring Shakespeare theatres in America.

Black and white photo of a Tina Packer on stage in a period costume with puffed sleeves, looking to the side.
Black and white still of two actors, a woman with short hair wearing a headscarf making a surprised expression and a man with short hair and facial hair looking distressed, in a theatrical scene.

Born in Wolverhampton, England, Tina trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, was an Associate Artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

She performed in the West End in over 20 productions. She has lectured or been the keynote speaker at over 30 colleges and universities including Columbia, Harvard, and M.I.T, and has received six honorary doctorate degrees.

Tina has also been the subject of TV and film specials; Sex, Violence & Poetry: a Portrait of Tina Packer was produced by WGBH, and Brush Up Your Shakespeare, an hour-long concert special in partnership with the Boston Pops and Boston Philharmonic Orchestra on PBS.

I had a fairly traditional path for an actor in British theatre.

I trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, did a couple of plays in regional theatre, a cop show for television (where the character I played was simply called “the wife”) and then I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was there I met John Barton, who not only cast me as the Princess of France in Love’s Labors Lost, but also gave me almost daily coaching on how to approach the text and structure of Shakespeare’s Verse. It was a huge moment of recognition for me – that there not only was a form to what Shakespeare wrote, but there was psychological and philosophical information embedded in that form. If the actor held the form she/he/they were able to go much deeper into the content, the emotions have an accuracy and power to make a real impact on the audience.

It was a revelation that changed my life. However, once I got it, I was impatient to explore it to extremes – and John and Peter Hall and John Schlesinger and Clifford Williams and Trever Nunn – (though we only did a workshop production of a Greek play together) while they would have long intellectual discussions with me, didn’t seem particularly interested in visceral exploration, how to get the thought and imagination into the body.

That difference—between intellect and visceral expression—was where my individual journey began.

My determination to find out what the body and voice had to reveal about structure is what led me from acting to directing (so that I had authority in the rehearsal room), and by directing, I started to put together the training I thought necessary for actors to embody the whole of themselves (mind, body, spirit, imagination) in order to explore Shakespeare’s plays on every level and thus manifest all the extremes of human behavior – individual and collective. It became my life’s work. —Tina Packer

Two acting students sitting in chairs face-to-face, with Tina Packer standing between them, speaking to the woman on the right. An empty room with chairs stacked against the back wall.

Tina Packer teaching in the actor training program at Shakespeare & Company.

A young Tina Packer with short hair wearing a sweatshirt, smiling and holding onto a metal bar, standing near electronic equipment in a dark room on the set of Dr. Who.

Tina Packer in Doctor Who (The Web of Fear).