Romeo Montague Behind Bars: A Shakespeare Prison Theatre Workshop led by Mariacristina Cavecchi, Lisa Mazoni, Margaret Rose, Giuseppe Scutellà

Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediation at the University of Milan, where she teaches British and Irish Theatre and Performance.

Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century British and Irish drama and theatre, focusing on visual/verbal intersections. She has written extensively on contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays for theatre and cinema (stage productions, adaptations, rewrites), Shakespeare in contemporary popular culture, and Prison Shakespeare. She is the author of The Art Gallery on Stage. New Vistas on Contemporary British Playwriting (Bloomsbury, 2024), Cerchi e cicli. Sulle forme della memoria in Ulisse (Bulzoni, 2012), Percorsi nel teatro inglese dell’Ottocento e del primo Novecento (ETS, 2012) and Shakespeare mostro contemporaneo (1998).

She was the European Coordinator of TYPUS - Transforming Young People Using Shakespeare, a Creative Europe programme involving an international consortium of partners from Italy, Norway and Greece, with long-standing experience in intercultural theatre, social inclusion, and justice. From 2012 to 2018, she was a member of the board of the Italian Association of Shakespearean and Early Modern Studies (IASEMS).

She held the Chair of British Theatre Studies and Performance at Milan University until her retirement in 2019, after which she taught the M.A. programme in Theatre Studies until 2024. Since Milan’s Expo, Feeding the Planet, she has researched Shakespeare and the natural world, both as an academic (Exposhakespeare, il sommo gourmet, il cibo e i cannibali (co.eds, Milano University Press, 2016); Shakespeare, Our Personal Trainer: Teaching Shakespeare in Secondary Schools (co.eds., Cambridge Scholars, 2020); Shakespeare, Arlecchino and Green Passion, a documentary (script, Maggie Rose, directors, James and Liz Willets, 2021); My Green Shakespeares, Critical Stages\Scenes critiques, 2022, https://www.critical-stages.org/26/my-green-shakespeares/); Play Your Part. Climate Change Theatre (Milano University Press 2022) and as a playwright. She has written about 20 stage plays, many performed in Italy and the UK. Her retellings of Shakespeare include A Walk in Shakespeare’s Garden, Caliban’s Castle and Ophelia, Herb Women (see the trailer on YouTube), which have been performed in theatres and botanical gardens. Other plays, like Tristan Martinelli. A World full of Harlequins and Shelley. A Diet for Peace place historical figures centre stage. She was co-creator of and dramaturg for TYPUS (Transforming Young People Using Shakespeare) 2022-24, a Creative Europe programme involving a consortium of partners from Italy, Norway and Greece, with long-standing experience in the field of intercultural theatre, social inclusion, and justice. Since 2015, she has co-led the annual Shakespeare Prison Workshop at Milan’s “Cesare Beccaria” Youth Detention Centre. She is Chairperson of English Theatre Milan, a non-profit association producing and importing new writing in English to Milan as well as retellings of Shakespeare.