Year Three: A Carnival of Errors

Shakespeare belongs to everyone.
We want more people to experience his plays in whatever way they can: sitting in the audience, working with them in a classroom or performing them.

Norwich Theatre is one of six theatres that has been working with the Royal Shakespeare Company for more than three years to create new ways of engaging adults with Shakespeare – and some with theatre for the first time through Shakespeare Nation.

A Carnival of Errors explores our own city’s response to the themes of Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors – community, identity, power-play, corruption.

“Shakespeare Nation is an extraordinary collaboration, bringing communities and individuals together to create and share, support and inspire. This project continues to offer a magical start to a lifelong love of Shakespeare and theatre” Miche Montague

FEAST: A Carnival of Errors

Roll up, roll up and feast your eyes upon our carnival of errors.

Set in Norfolk, a colourful celebration of community and identity.

Asghar the carnival King is dead. LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!

His troupe of magnificent misfits celebrate his life at his final feast. Adriana, his wife, is torn between a quiet life and carnival queendom. His mistress Courtia’s search for alimony is complicated by no one knowing how many children Asghar actually had. Meanwhile Effy, the dead man’s daughter, grows into her big-girl pants when Balthasar the bailiff comes to liquidate.

Directed by Miche Montague

We would like to thank our project participation partners:

FABBA and The Hamlet, as well as all of our participants and practitioners who have been a part of this programme.

Collaboration

This year Norwich Theatre has worked with FABBA Theatre Company for adults with learning disabilities in Great Yarmouth and The Hamlet in Norwich working with young adults with profound disabilities and complex health needs. Participants have taken part in a series of outreach workshops, engaging both groups in a whole host of art forms: visual arts, music making, clowning and much more. The group of performers, include people from Norwich Theatre’s creative engagement programmes, some of whom have never taken part in anything like this before. In addition to this, Norwich Forum Writers have contributed new pieces of writing to the carnival, and Norwich Theatre has held further writing workshops with the Wellbeing Service. Norwich Theatre also engaged students from East Coast College and the University of East Anglia to create media content.