Warwickshire-based Shakespeare Young Company, which is in its fifth year of development, is undertaking an expansion plan to reach more young people in the UK.
The Year of Love and Forbidden Love involves four companies of young performers developing and presenting different productions indoors, outdoors and in unusual locations.
In June The White Company will unveil Venus and Adonis, sourced from Shakespeare’s poem. It will be presented in a range of garden settings.
At the same time Mary King, founding and executive director of Playbox Theatre Company, is developing The Taming of The Shrew with The Red Company which will be staged in The Playroom studio at Shakespeare Young Company’s base, The Dream Factory in Warwick.
SYC’s two new companies The Rose Company and The Fortune Company will next year produce The Merchant of Venice for The Dream Factory main space and a site-specific production of Romeo and Juliet for Warwick Winter Almanac.
SYC will hold a residential summer school in Warwick in August 2014, inviting young people from across the UK to spend two weeks staging Shakespeare and building productions.
SYC enables young people to perform the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with emphasis on the work as living, contemporary drama.
RSC associate artist Anton Lesser and Andrew Hilton, founder and artistic director of Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, have joined SYC as associate patrons.