Happily acting and improvising away after retiring as a university lecturer in early modern English theatre.
Joined June 2011
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219 Photos and videos
I'm doing my improvised Shakespeare show a few times this spring and summer - first up, part of the triple bill opening the mighty Liverpool Improvisation Festival next week!
Tickets: unitytheatreliverpool.co.uk/…
Today’s Featured Liverpool Improv Festival Act – INTERVIEW – Shakespeare On The Spot
@stephenlongstaffe @liverpool_improv_festival #improv #interview #liverpool thephoenixremix.com/2026/04/…
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Carnival versus Lent!
Despite bidding many farewells to it, there is still far too much of my own flesh.
I am a man more thinned against than thinning.
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Stephen Longstaffe retweeted
6 Oct 2025
A week past Michaelmas, this is also the Michaelmas moon of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight':
'Thus runs the year in yesterdays many,
And winter wends again, as the world asks,
in truth,
Until Michaelmas moon
Was come with winter's wage...'
x.com/ClerkofOxford/status/1…
28 Sep 2019
'Michaelmas moon' is the full moon which occurs close to the feast, and the time around it. In 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', Michaelmas moon is said to bring with it 'wynter wage' - a chill pledge of winter coming, and the prospect of accounts to be settled.
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6 Oct 2025
I'm finally performing this in Liverpool on Saturday. I can't wait! Part of #Liverpoolfringe2025.
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Stephen Longstaffe retweeted
15 Aug 2025
Auditions for this year's production of scenes from the N-Town cycle are on Monday 18 and Thursday 28 August. Performances 4-6 December, Chalk Farm NW3. We're looking for actors, singers & backstage helpers. Full details on website theplayersofstpeter.org.uk/a…
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Stephen Longstaffe retweeted
4 Jul 2025
We're kicking off Crossed Wires festival with a piece of audio history! Jarvis Cocker has recorded a special version of the Shipping Forecast to mark its centenary. It'll be played in full at a special Ships live show at the @crossedwires_/@BBCSounds Fringe today. Thanks Jarv!
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3 Jul 2025
At Hampton Court yesterday, with Henry VIII's fool Will Summers.
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10 Jun 2025
My best Shakespeare on the Spot so far, at the King's Arms Salford for the Greater Manchester Improvisation Festival on Saturday. In the misery pic I'm soliloquising about Julius Caesar's assassination - the audience suggestion was that a piano dropped on his head.
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29 Apr 2025
So excited! Ten 'new' funny early modern plays. I got the weekend pass to see the lot. Proper jokes, generous comic humanity; the same characters, different situations. I'm cast as a grumpy farting old git. Bit of a failure of the imagination there, I feel, but hey. Come!
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12 Apr 2025
RIP. WSI really gripped my imagination as a theatre student, mostly via the Engineers of the Imagination handbook and the few videos I could find mid-80s. A pioneer vision blending visual arts, humour, ritual, performance and community. theguardian.com/stage/2025/a…
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Stephen Longstaffe retweeted
1 Apr 2025
🃏 The Fool – A Card of New Beginnings
Happy April Fool's Day!
Today, we're sharing The Fool card from the Tarot de Marseille Gassmann deck (c.1865). Symbolising adventure, risk, and new beginnings, The Fool invites us to embrace the unknown and take a leap of faith.
#Tarot
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14 Mar 2025
I love these 16th century grotesques!
14 Mar 2025
The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel, 1565 - Flashbak buff.ly/I5yiFnx
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10 Mar 2025
This raised a chuckle - Plato's theory of Forms, applied to the LFC-PSG game: 'a smash-and-grab of such Platonic perfection that it belongs among the great thinker's higher realm of Ideals'.
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24 Feb 2025
It's been around 45 years since I wrote and performed comedy sketches with @MikeHaskins11. Last night 'Lutwidge', in which Lewis Carroll (Steve Wallis, here) attempts to explain Jabberwocky to his publisher, won an award at Liverpool's Weird and Wonderful festival!
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14 Feb 2025
It's about time for another victory lap for this academic work probing the beliefs of the Elizabethan clergyman Hugh Sexey. Still the most dontastic chapter title ever!
20 May 2014
Okay this has to be the greatest academic essay title ever to grace a page
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13 Feb 2025
I was in one of these hugely enjoyable workshops last month. This epic (sit)-comedy, with up to ten different actors reading the same role, pushes all my clown/improvisor/early drama nerd buttons. Got my weekend pass for the May readings already!
13 Feb 2025
I’ve written ten plays for you to enjoy ! Full story here theguardian.com/stage/2025/f…
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10 Feb 2025
The @HighamHall brochure has just arrived, and I have to say this looks pretty cool. I've had a great time researching and choosing material. Now I get to teach it! Bookings via highamhall.com/
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7 Feb 2025
Dickens does Ben Jonson, @BeyondShakes
Charles Dickens was born #OTD 1812. In July 1847 he performed in a benefit show at Manchester’s Theatre Royal with various members of his family and circle of friends. This rare playbill from our collections records the particulars. (1/2)
ALT Playbill advertising a benefit for Mr Leigh Hunt with a performance of Ben Johnson's 'Every Man in his Humour'. Charles Dickens is listed as performing in the role of Captain Bobadil.
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Stephen Longstaffe retweeted
28 Jan 2025
St. Hedwig calls out a nun who has a hedgehog "up her sleeve..." 🦔🥰
Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XI 7
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