Shakespeare North Playhouse has announced a packed new season of theatre, comedy, community activity and workshops - including a Macbeth co-production with English Touring Theatre, Northern Stage and Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio - the first printed edition of the collected plays - and the playhouse is marking this with programming that acknowledges its historic significance.
London-based Shakespeare’s Globe company will visit the playhouse for the first time, with a production of Midsummer Mechanicals, a follow-up to the play within-a-play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Creative director of SNP, Laura Collier says: ‘It has been an incredible first six months and we’re so excited to announce the second half of our opening year."
The season:
Cockpit Theatre
A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, by Amanda Rose Hall (May 16-20) - An experiment in eco- theatre-making between London's Barbican and touring company Headlong. The play will tour but the people and materials do not. The Barbican opens the tour but for every stop the show will be brought to life by local teams – part of an international experiment in reimagining touring theatre.
This innovative one woman show confronts the ecological disaster unfolding around us. Headlong will stage the play in Coventry, Plymouth, Newcastle, Newcastle-under-Lyme, the Shakespeare North Playhouse and in York. Further venues to be announced.
Midsummer Mechanicals (July 15-18) – From Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. It follows Peter Quince’s acting troupe – known as the Mechanicals – as they attempt to recapture the success of their first hit, Pyramus and Thisbe. Chaos ensues...
Macbeth (September 1-23) – From English Touring Theatre, Shakespeare North Playhouse, Northern Stage and Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg. A new production that asks why Macbeth has haunted our fears for centuries, and what lesson is this cautionary tale still urgently trying to communicate to us?
The Studio
Off Your Bonnet (March 10-11) – Mooncup Theatre: Exploring themes of isolation, feminism and imagination through the parallel of our modern world and the world the Bronte sisters inhabited.
Ladyfriends (a period drama) (March 23-24) – A romp through love letters, third dates, and lesbian period dramas – via the (probably) true stories of Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst.
Shewolves (May 14) - Somewhere between Booksmart, Little Miss Sunshine and Thelma & Louise.
Wild Time: a theatrical novel (June 24) – A punk prose retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
No Coward Soul by Emily Parr and Every Time I Close My Eyes, All I See Is You by Sam Freeman (July 4) – A tragi-comic one-woman show containing... 37 characters.
The Red Queen and Other Monsters (July 28-30) – Some of the most reviled women in classic literature – from infanticidal Medea to fratricidal Goneril – explain themselves or simply revel in their crimes.
More info and tickets here