Twelfth Night
— “How will this fadge???” 🥴
The Research and Development week for our production of Twelfth Night begins on the 28th of September, and we are itching to go. Our Co-Lead Lucie Dawkins is directing. The cast is made up of members of the collective along with several brilliant associate artists. We’ll be announcing the full team very soon.
Rehearsals for the full-scale production of Twelfth Night start in Spring 2025. Our first performances will be in the warehouse space at our very own SCRUM Studios in Hammersmith. Then on our national tour we will be performing performing in postcode areas identified by ACE and DCMS as under-funded for the arts. In each area we go to, we will be offering workshops, resources and tickets to schools.
You can read more about our Education programme here.
Why Twelfth Night?
At its heart, Twelfth Night is a story about a community waking up to joy again after a difficult time - which is fitting for our new venue. There’s something radical about insisting on joy in spite of dark times.
But it’s also a deeply complicated play about our responsibility to each other, and how desire and violence can be two sides of the same coin. Times are hard right now, and we deserve great daft joyous stories - but also ones that don’t shy away from the knotty parts of being alive.
Twelfth Night, we think, is one of Shakespeare’s best and most complicated stories. As a queer-led collective, this lovely gnarly play about desire and identity fascinates us. We also like to make a mess with our work and play fast and hard with the rules. And Twelfth Night is a banger (there’s a good reason people have wanted to hear it again and again for 400 years) - but it’s fortunately long out of copyright, so we can do what we want with it.