2.30pm
Shakespeare's Globe Touring Company
College Hall
Ticket Price: £18

The Winter's Tale

Shakespeare's Globe Trust is dedicated to the experience and international understanding of Shakespeare in performance. Uniquely its work celebrates the fact that the greatest dramatic poet in the English language lived and worked in London and that the cradle of English theatre was on Bankside by the River Thames.

In 2007, for the first time in four hundred years, a traveling company headed off around the country from the Globe Theatre. Now this prestigious company comes to the Worcester Three Choirs Festival for the first time, to perform in the unique surroundings of College Hall.

In Shakespeare's time actors often toured plays to country houses, inns and town halls all over the UK. The players regularly left London, sometimes due to playhouse closure to prevent the spread of plague or according to government bans, sometimes simply to extend the life of a new play. The actors of the Shakespeare's Globe Touring Company emulate the experience of Elizabethan players, taking all the equipment they need and adapting the play to a wealth of contrasting venues.

At Worcester Three Choirs Festival, the company presents The Winter's Tale. One of Shakespeare's final works (along with Pericles and The Tempest), The Winter's Tale shows the destructive power of jealousy as Leontes' unjustified rage causes him to lose his wife, his son and his baby daughter. The play ends happily with two marriages and Hermione's miraculous 'resurrection'.
www.shakespeares-globe.org