One of the most impactful and longest running cultural education projects in the UK, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank is now in its fourteenth year, and is our flagship project for secondary and post-16 further education students.

Supported by Deutsche Bank as part of Born To Be, their global youth engagement programme which aims to help young people prepare for the futute and unlock their potential, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank sees Shakespeare’s plays adapted in to fast-paced productions with young people in mind.

This year’s production is Macbeth, and despite being written more than 400 years ago, the themes of loyalty, courage and guilt that are raised in Shakespeare’s tragedy are still as relevant today. Directed by Cressida Brown, we’ve adapted this production to help young people understand these important topics and to encourage them to discuss mental health as a means of improving well-being, self-esteem and communication skills.

All students are required to study a Shakespeare text for GCSE, but strangely, it is not compulsory to see a Shakespeare play in performance. Experiencing live performance helps students immerse themselves into the play and better understand the timeless issues which affect them and society.

‘Macbeth is the most studied play in UK schools, but how many students will ever see the play in performance? This is why the need for Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank is so urgent’

— Patrick Spottiswoode, Director of Globe Education

This is why Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank is such an important project, and so popular. This year, 18,000 free tickets have been snapped up by London and Birmingham state secondary schools, and a further 7,000 free or subsidised tickets have been taken up by families, schools and community groups. We’re also absolutely delighted to be streaming this production for the first time in the project’s history, so that even more students will be able to see Macbeth in performance.

What’s more, we continue to run our workshops for schools across the country, as well as our continuing professional development (CPD) courses for teachers. Furthermore, we’ve also recently launched our free resources for Macbeth online to support GCSE and A-Level curricula, that will not only be used by schools across the globe this year, but that will be freely available in the years to come. Our previous award-winning resources for past Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank projects are still available now.

Our mission with this project has always been to give students the opportunity to see a Shakespeare play as he intended: live and unplugged, and we cannot wait to welcome young people from across the country to see Macbeth in the Globe Theatre this spring.