Shakespeare's Heartbeat. Second Edition Launched!

The games of this book; their physicality, rhythms and tunes come from hours and days and weeks, months and years of sitting at floor level with autistic people, moving, singing, healing and playing.

It’s October 3^rd, 2025. London. Storm Amy is whipping her way through Euston as storms often do when I try to have any sort of event let alone a celebration of an achievement. On Friday 18^th February 2022, Storm Eunice had put pay to our celebration of Flute Theatre’s three years of community performances with autistic people, with a few brave souls risking being hit by the falling trees of Hammersmith arriving bedraggled to Riverside Studios, whilst most stayed home. As I remember, the 20 or so people who did make it managed to drink all the alcohol that we had bought to refresh the 100 or so expected guests and like the Party in Pentapolis: Act 2 Pericles we danced, laughed and loved each other in sweet oblivion to the amassing storms of war and fallings in and out that lay ahead.

And now three and a half years later I’ve managed to write the second edition of my book Shakespeare’s Heartbeat which documents the drama games I’ve created for autistic people using The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. First published in 2014, it sold well enough for Routledge to ask me to revise it not realising the depth of experience I and my fellow Flute Theatre actors have had with these two plays during this time. So, it took a while to do. Whereas the first edition was borne out of workshops in the UK and US, this new edition of the book is borne out of public performances with the autistic community in many languages around the world.

And now it’s published. We held the launch at the Oxfam Bookshop in Bloomsbury who generously opened their doors (leading to much of Storm Amy’s wind and rain pouring in to join us) to our guests. A Flute Theatre party has a specific feel to it, and this was no different – doors are genuinely open to the autistic community who tell me time and again that they are not normally welcomed nor invited to such events. It was a highlight to have Jack Cresswell and his mum Michelle with us who braved the weather all the way from Brighton to be with us. Thanks Jack.

Our performances of Dream and Tempest are interactive unique encounters for a maximum of twelve autistic people per show. At the beginning of each performance, we offer the opportunity for our autistic participants to leap and jump with their actor partners personifying either the mischief of Puck who can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes or the fiery lift-off of Ariel desiring her liberty. These embodied leaps move the story forward whilst simultaneously offering the participants a physical and emotional catharsis. And just as this early game in the performances gives the participants their wings, the book itself has flown far away from me during its ten years of life, landing in the laps of the most unlikely people and offering them a path to making theatre with the marginalised. Many of those people were able to join me at the launch in London but as this work has taken root around the world, at least four times as many people were not.

One of these is Marzieh N**********, who contacted me during the Covid pandemic from Tehran. We have never met. I may not be able to send her a copy of the new book due to restrictions between the UK and Iran, but her words make up the foreward in the new edition in which she tells how she found my games via a copy of Shakespeare’s Heartbeat bought over there, she based her MA thesis on it, working with autistic children and passed with flying colours. The day she passed she sent me a voice note - the first time I had heard her voice - and we’ve been able to communicate with each other since, enough for her to contribute her experience to the foreword of the book. She sent this message for us to read out at the launch.

“The first book written by you changed my life in so many ways. I discovered parts of me that had always been labelled wrong. I discovered a power to do things I never thought possible. Standing in a room full of people and explaining the relation between art, literature and autism, I saw looks of surprise and admiration on their faces. To be a part of this book is something else I could never predict when I first emailed you at 3 am. Thank you for creating opportunities for everyone. You are loved Kelly, by me and by many people who don’t know your name but have benefited your creativity and strength. Marzieh”

A book may seem archaic in these days. But my book helped Marzieh help others and in doing so she helped herself. It gave her a voice. The games which make up this book; their physicality, their rhythms, and their tunes come from hours and days and weeks and months and years of sitting at floor level with autistic people moving, singing, healing and playing. The principle of “Welcome” behind the endeavour, that gives time and space for shared “unremembered acts of kindness and love” remains embedded in this second edition, which I hope may have similar wings to its elder. The launch, accompanied by its own actual Tempest, was a gathering of family, neighbours, friends and colleagues helping me give wings to this new edition. Wings that will fly into a world where increasing numbers of people are losing their voices and must find them again in order that everyone remains welcome to each other.

To buy the book with a 20% discount visit Routledge, Shakespeare's Heartbeat