One of the most impactful and longest running cultural education projects in the UK, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank is now in its fifteenth 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 future and unlock their potential, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank sees Shakespeare’s plays adapted in to fast-paced productions with young people in mind.

In March 2020 we were forced to cancel our run of Macbeth due to the pandemic, when we ceased all performances, events and tours at Shakespeare’s Globe. However, nearly half a million of you were able to watch this production online, for free, during lockdown, supporting families, teachers and students as they navigated the uncertain waters of online learning.

The delay to our reopening earlier this spring, means that this year’s Playing Shakespeare production is now taking place in the Autumn half-term, and we cannot wait to welcome nearly 18,000 young people through our great oak doors into the Globe Theatre for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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.

This is why Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank is such an important project, and so popular. Since the project began, over 200,000 students from Birmingham and London state secondary schools have been give free tickets to watch a performance in the Globe Theatre, and further free or subsidised tickets have been taken up by families, schools and community groups across the UK.

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. This year, we’re thrilled to offer free onsite and online CPD courses, so teachers around the world can benefit from a two hour informative session packed with inspiring ways to teach A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the classroom, with tools on analysing language, characters, themes and the text in performance.

Furthermore, we’ve also recently launched our free resources for A Midsummer Night’s Dream 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 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Globe Theatre this autumn.