This year's Playmaking Festival is a moment to celebrate the work of young people and their teachers from across England right here in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is a culmination of the work that happens in classrooms across schools we work in long-term partnership with as part of our Associate Schools Programme, and the work that takes place with our local school community in Stratford.

On Tuesday 9 July, Hamlet will be performed by students from Associate Schools in County Durham, Kent, Northampton, North Staffordshire and Warwickshire. It will be a relaxed performance, which will include a prologue created by our local Warwickshire cluster of Special Education Needs Associate Schools, BSL interpretation, and captioning. This production has inclusion at its heart – supporting more people to experience this story of grief and a search for belonging.

Over the course of the week, we’ll see over 250 young people from Special Education Needs Schools, Primary and Secondary schools perform on the Swan Theatre stage. 

On Friday 12 July we welcome schools from across Stratford-upon-Avon working together on their performance of Hamlet.

In all of these schools, the work is deeply rooted in the artistic practice of our Company. Alongside our Associate Regional Theatre Partners, we support young people and their teachers to approach these texts as our actors do; something to be explored and understood together as we create our performance, and hope that - through the process - they develop a lifelong relationship with theatre making and with Shakespeare’s plays.