Shakespeare Nation
Shakespeare is for everyone.
Past Projects
Year One: A Tale of Many Cities, 2019
Norwich Theatre’s response to the RSC’s title Romeo and Juliet was to call the project A Tale of Many Cities – a reflection of our fine city and collaboration with the local refugee, student, academic, and vulnerable young adults communities.
The make-up of Norwich has always been changing. The city has always welcomed visitors from afar. The city’s population is as diverse as ever, and its diversity will continue to grow. At the time of the project, the political climate meant day-to-day conversations meandered around immigration, Brexit and the unknown for the future and how we, as the UK, will fit in and be perceived by the rest of the world. Yet Norwich could proudly boast itself as a welcoming city. Norwich Theatre wanted the project to reflect this.
Year Two: Brave New World, 2020
Year Three: A Carnival of Errors, 2021
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, and corruption.
Year Four: Julius Caesar, 2023
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s great political tragedy, is the perfect play for our age of crisis, asking questions about how far we’d go to shift power. This production explored what really makes a leader, as well as inviting questions about gender and power.
Working closely with local Music Director Xenia Horne and RSC practitioners, our chorus developed their creative skills while exploring the nature of what makes a good leader today. The hope is that this chorus of community champions will continue to inform and challenge the work of Norwich Theatre and the RSC beyond the production. Working with people who lead for their community and understand the needs they serve is invaluable in the Nation project’s mission to ensure the work is relevant to those we create it with and for.
Through workshops and masterclasses, our Community Chorus explored voice and movement to create an elemental, tribal force, haunting Rome; evoking destruction and a spiritual, environmental reckoning beyond the story in the play.
Year 5: Norwich Hamlets, 2025
A celebration of cultural belonging
In partnership with Royal Shakespeare Company and, more importantly, with groups of creative people who gathered together at the start of the year as strangers, we collectively created a living, breathing expression of community voices, weaved together through the timeless lens of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Norwich Hamlets was a walk, literally and metaphorically, through a city of stories, each one equal in its right to be heard. Audiences became participants in a journey inviting them to listen, reflect and connect. A fostering of cultural belonging. People heard their languages and humour, their struggles and their dreams performed, and felt seen.
5 mini-plays – Green Girl, Something Rotten, Turk Hamlet, Aham and Storytellers – shaped by the lived experiences, hopes and challenges of Norwich’s communities, gave voice to powerful declarations of identity, resilience and imagination.
Norwich Hamlets was a celebration of what it means to belong to Norwich Theatre, and to Norwich itself. What began as a gathering of strangers became a chorus of voices: strangers no more, but storytellers of a shared city.