Bardwatching: Summer Term 1 2022-23

The much-anticipated £38m Shakespeare North Playhouse has now opened its doors in Prescot, Merseyside. Based on the Cockpit-in-Court, first built for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533 on a site just behind present-day Downing Street, and later used for staging plays until its destruction in the 1670s, the new Prescot theatre is oak-framed, galleried and roofed, with a blue ceiling, and descending chandeliers to facilitate candlelit performances.

First conceived as an idea in the 1990s, the project has overcome many financial setbacks through the persistence of its instigator the architect Nick Helm and his collaborators academic Richard Wilson and director David Thacker. The original idea was to create a theatre in the grounds of Hoghton Tower, a fortified manor house in another part of Lancashire, where an oral tradition holds that Bard may have spent some of his teenage years.