Edward's Boys
This is a group established by Perry Mills, Deputy Head at King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon, the school Shakespeare himself probably attended, which performs plays by Shakespeare and others, especially those written for the Elizabethan boy companies, with casts entirely of boys from the school.
It grew initially out of the school’s involvement with Michael Wood’s BBC series In Search of Shakespeare and subsequent workshops on the Elizabethan boy player developed with Carol Chillington Rutter.
The company—which changes composition as boys move up and leave school, its members gradually gaining more experience to take on more important roles—has not only performed on its home territory but in the RSC Swan, the Globe’s Bear Garden and Wanamaker Theatres and at Oxford and Warwick Universities.
They have presented extracts from Lyly’s Endymion and Mother Bombie with casts of younger boys (aged 11-12) and full productions of the early-seventeenth-century city comedies The Dutch Courtesan, A Mad World My Masters and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which used large casts drawn from across the school. In 2011, the company turned to tragedy for the first time, with Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge.
The award is for their 2014 production of John Lyly’s Galatea.