Tributes to former Stratford drama teacher Susan Warren who took passion for Shakespeare across Atlantic
TRIBUTES have been paid to a former Stratford drama teacher who took her passion for Shakespeare across the Atlantic.
Susan Mary Warren, who died at home in Santa Cruz, California on July 20th, is remembered as a woman of intellect and talent who transformed children’s and young people’s lives.
A highly skilled artist and craftswoman, she often made elaborate costumes for productions.
Born in Mansfield in 1934, she went to study at London’s prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama IN 1952.
While there she visited Stratford many times and after graduating from Central with a diploma in Teaching of Speech and Drama, and from the University of London with a diploma in Dramatic Art with a teaching certificate, she taught at a state school in Birmingham and then a college in Felixstowe before moving to Stratford to take up a job in the costume shop of the Memorial Theatre.
On arriving in Stratford, she discovered there was no job but found work as a guide at Hall’s Croft, before becoming dramatic arts teacher at Stratford High School for Girls in 1958.
Susan co-designed a completely new curriculum which was widely acclaimed and lived happily in the town. Five years later, her life changed completely after meeting her future husband, Michael Warren, who was visiting a mutual friend in Stratford.
This proved to be the catalyst for her to go and work in Nova Scotia, and Michael, then at the University of Victoria, recommended her for a job as a voice coach at a local Shakespeare Festival. Shortly afterwards they decided to marry, and she joined Michael who by then was a graduate student at California’s Berkeley and they tied the knot in June 1965.
Later that year, Susan began teaching classes in voice and speech, children’s theatre and literature at San Francisco State College, reaching assistant professor level before she resigned in 1968 to go with Michael who’d been offered a job at the University of Santa Cruz.
Susan carried on with her creative and theatre work, while raising the couple’s two children.
A popular volunteer children’s storyteller at a large bookshop and Santa Cruz’s public library, she ran after-school drama classes and collaborated with teachers in local schools to bring the arts and theatre into the classroom throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Her proudest achievement was co-founding the Company of Little Eyases, a children’s Shakespeare troupe.
Named after a reference in Hamlet to a group of boy actors dubbed ‘eyases’ or young hawks, it trained children from across the county in Shakespearean acting and toured shortered versions of the classics, for a decade.
Her passion for the works of Shakespeare and for theatre never waned and she never lost her ability to recite long passages from the Bard’s plays and sonnets.
Susan is survived by her husband Michael, daughter Kate and son Adam.