Gareth

I have worked as a musician and an actor. As an actor I have played in much of the Shakespeare cannon - I won't list them all but Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night, Camilo in The Winter's Tale and Saturninus in Titus Andronicus. In addition I've played in half a dozen further Shakespeare, as well as in Chekov, Camus, Turgenev and a number of contemporary writers. Much of my theater work is with acclaimed London based company Arrows & Traps.

I have published in an academic journal, for the Science Fiction Foundation's "The Parliament of Dreams: Conferring on Babylon 5". I have also published further essays and short stories.

My most notable musical foray was as part of the Queen Tribute band "Killer Queen" who still tour to this day - I played the bass guitar and as such can say I have been a professional John Deacon impersonator. We toured all over the UK and into Europe and played the west end long before We Will Rock You began.

Tutoring Experience

Although I haven't tutored as such previously, I have trained in IT quite extensively - for a time I worked in the digital documentation departments of a number of city law firms, and played a major part in the roll out of new technologies. I began doing this in the 90's when perhaps the computer wasn't as ubiquitous as it has become, and so really had to educate employees from the ground up in their use of IT.

Tutoring Approach

My approach to Literature is best summed up as - it isn't a dead form, regardless of when it was written. Shakespeare sees dynamic reinterpretation in any and every production, Chekov always brings out something of the now. It is this capacity to be both historical and yet to chime contemporaneously that separates the greats of literature from the great swathes of production that we no longer remember, or are of only academic interest. Anything that finds its way onto an A level syllabus will be there because it has that capacity to chime with our milieu, and that's what I will look to bring out.

This is as much the case in the instances of novels and, especially, poetry. It is poetry that is often seen as the most intimidating. Whilst well grounded in British poetry since the Renaissance it is the Romantics that are my specialty, and I would look to bring out the urgency of the political commentary to Wordsworth, Byron, Shelly and Keats, to show that a poem about an urn is as much about philosophy as it is art, that calls to freedom in historical settings are as much calls against political repression in the poet's own world. And to look to 20th and 21st century poetry and see the marks of history in how the particular poet looks at the world.