One of the most impactful and longest running cultural education projects in the UK, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank is now in its sixteenth 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 students 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.

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 Sarah Frankcom, former Artistic Director of LAMDA, we’ve adapted this thrilling and chilling tale into a 90-minute production that is a fantastic introduction to Shakespeare and live theatre, enabling young people to get to grips with the play’s complex language, characters and themes.

Charting Macbeth’s bloody journey from hero to tyrant, Macbeth is now playing in our Globe Theatre, and we’ve already welcomed so many students through our great oak doors this month. Schools across the country will be able to watch the show until 30 March 2022, with public performances running from 19 March – 16 April 2022, perfect for the whole family.

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. This year, 20,000 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.

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’re so thrilled to see so many young people from across the country in our wooden ‘O’ this spring.