Guildford Shakespeare Company: 18 years and counting

On my laptop screen from some 40 miles away, Matt Pinches settles into the costume cupboard of the Guildford Shakespeare Company (GSC). Behind and alongside him runs a rail of costumes – I spy some velvet – and in his cable-knit jumper and round glasses, he emits a certain cosiness. Yet within seconds, it becomes clear that he's absolutely alive with an almost frenetic energy – there is an infectious sense that he is capable of finding endless inspiration in the people and places around him.

It makes sense, therefore, that he is one of two cofounders of the GSC, whose main objective is to make Shakespeare as accessible as possible. Founded with Sarah Gobran 18 years ago, the GSC's site-responsive approach has, according to its website, ‘been the key to breaking down’ barriers many feel they face when it comes to theatre. Some of those barriers, Pinches tells me, might be financial, geographical or – most commonly – a perception that Shakespeare is simply too difficult to enjoy.

The company's inception

Challenging this perception is, I'm told, at the heart of the GSC. ‘When the company began, one of our biggest remits was to demystify the notion that theatre is only for a few people – that you've got to be rich or well-educated to enjoy Shakespeare,’ Pinches says. ‘Theatre should be – is – for everybody.’

The story behind the GSC's inception goes that in 2005, Gobran, having been auditioning for other open-air theatre companies, decided that she was at a crossroads. She was either going to look after orphaned elephants for a few months, or she would put on an open-air show in Guildford. Pinches immediately told her that he would partner up with her on the latter, ‘and here we are 18 years later.’

Since then, much has changed – from pupils' access to arts education and theatres' access to arts funding – but the GSC has continued to grow. This is not to suggest it hasn't been faced with challenges, though speaking with Pinches, I can't help but feel that any challenge would be safely managed in his hands. He speaks enthusiastically about some of the unusual locations for past productions – ‘beautiful gardens, a Georgian church, a Boeing 747, a lake, a castle, a former quarry – and how these settings invite the audience into the world of the play.

Outreach

In those 18 years since the company's founding, it has bedded into enthusiastic involvement with the local community. ‘Last year alone, our outreach engagement programmes and classes created 24,000 participation opportunities, and 18,000 of those were free to access through funding, donors or partnerships,’ Pinches says. ‘Guildford is often seen as an affluent, educated place. But it has some very large pockets of deprivation – there are children who go to school with no shoes, who would never think about going to the theatre.’

He tells me that he never envisaged that the company would have had such a significant impact, which cannot be understated. When the company works with schools, it's keen to interrogate Shakespeare from a personal or relational perspective. ‘Shakespeare isn't just about iambic pentameter or what the themes of Macbeth are. It's about who you are as a person, and whether you can test yourself within those characters. We might explore a play by explaining that it's about a young man whose father's died and his mother's marrying someone else, and he doesn't understand it. Or, here's a father with three daughters he doesn't attempt to understand. When you break it down like that, suddenly Shakespeare's plays go from being daunting to something very real.’

This summer, the GSC is putting on an open-air production of Romeo and Juliet. The first half will be performed on and throughout the streets of Guildford, while the second half will take place in the castle gardens. ‘We've done Romeo and Juliet twice before,’ Pinches says, ‘and we wanted to do something different to mark our 18th birthday. We decided to celebrate our community and our connection to this community – so we though that the streets of Guildford could become the streets of Verona.

‘What Baz Luhrmann's adaptation, and what West Side Story captures, is that it's hot and dangerous, and that anything could happen at any moment. It's chaotic, it's busy, it's alive – and it's real,’ Pinches says. ‘We wanted to encapsulate that this is a real story about real people.’

Community

As well as the main cast, Romeo and Juliet will be populated with two community choruses: ‘One is made up of young people from local schools and our in-house clubs, who will form the young people of the gangs, and then there an older, adult ensemble who will form the attendants at the masked Capulet ball.’

One of the key areas Pinches, who is directing the performance, is focusing on is the disconnect between the younger and older characters. ‘If the older generation had just stepped out of the way, I'm sure none of the violence would have happened,’ he explains. ‘Even the nurse and the friar make things worse for Romeo and Juliet – they think they're helping, but they're helping with their fingers in their ears. The young characters are not being listened to, and some of them form these gangs which, today, we might say are engaging in ‘anti-social behaviour’ – but quite often, these young people are not doing it wilfully. They're on the streets because they've not been listened to, there's nowhere for them to be.’

The desire to capture this intergenerational tension on the streets of Guildford with such exploration and empathy sounds, to my mind, like a perfectly modern retelling on one of the greatest romantic tragedies of another time.

guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk