By Grace Hatchell
Guildford Shakespeare Company expands knife crime programme during its 20th anniversary year
Guildford Shakespeare Company is marking its twentieth anniversary with an autumn programme which shows exactly how wide theatre’s reach can be.
One moment, Shakespeare is helping Year 9 pupils examine the consequences of carrying a knife. The next, thousands of young people are being given their first taste of professional theatre. Then, just when everyone appears to be behaving responsibly, a body turns up in a brewery.
I think that is what you call range.
At the heart of the season is the expansion of Put Up Your Swords, Guildford Shakespeare Company’s pioneering knife-crime awareness programme. Returning on 21 September, the eight-week initiative will reach more Surrey schools after working with approximately 2,000 young people during its first year.
Using Romeo and Juliet as its framework, the programme invites Year 9 pupils to examine violence, conflict, individual choices and their consequences.
Shakespeare may have written the play more than 400 years ago, but its young characters are still making impulsive decisions, being drawn into conflicts and discovering too late that violence cannot simply be taken back. That makes the story a powerful starting point for conversations which remain painfully relevant today.
Rather than standing in front of pupils and presenting them with a list of warnings, Put Up Your Swords places young people inside the discussion. In a creative and supportive environment, they are encouraged to consider the choices available to the characters and explore how safer outcomes might have been reached.
Pupils take part in drama workshops and professional stage-combat sessions, meet guest speakers with lived experience and visit the University of Surrey for a simulated court case in which Romeo is placed on trial.
It is an intelligent use of theatre. The programme does not pretend that watching one play will solve knife crime, but it gives young people room to examine decisions, challenge assumptions and talk honestly about consequences. Theatre cannot provide every answer, but it can ask questions in a way that stays with an audience long after the chairs have been put away.
Put Up Your Swords was developed after a stabbing close to GSC’s Guildford offices in 2023. The incident led the company to consider its own responsibility as a storyteller working with young people in the community.
The resulting programme was created alongside GSC’s 2024 production of Romeo and Juliet, with support from the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey, the University of Surrey, Fearless—the youth service of Crimestoppers UK—and several specialist charities.
There is something quietly powerful about taking a tragedy many pupils first encounter as a classroom text and allowing it to become a practical conversation about the world outside the school gates.
Free Shakespeare returns to schools
GSC’s commitment to younger audiences continues with the return of The Play’s The Thing, its touring programme for secondary schools.
Now entering its ninth year, the ten-week tour will take professional productions of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth to Year 10 and Year 11 pupils in less advantaged schools across Surrey and beyond.
The Surrey section of the tour will be offered free of charge, helping to ensure that shrinking school budgets do not decide which pupils are allowed to experience live theatre.
Last year’s funded tour created more than 8,000 free engagement opportunities for young people across Surrey. That is 8,000 chances for pupils to discover that Shakespeare makes considerably more sense when performed by actors than when everybody takes turns reading a paragraph aloud on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.
The tour will also travel to Reading in partnership with Reading Rep, Richmond in a co-production with the Orange Tree Theatre and the British School in The Hague. During half term, the productions will visit community venues for performances aimed at adult audiences.
Ben Harvey, whose credits include The History of Boys at the Old Red Lion Theatre and Reformed at the Bread and Roses Theatre, will play Romeo.
Cameron Quinn Chaver, previously seen in LAMDA productions of The Duchess of Malfi and A Wild Night in Toledo, takes the role of Juliet.
The Macbeth company will feature Finn O’Riordain, whose credits include Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare’s Globe, as Macbeth. Consuella Rolle, seen in Peter Pan Goes Wrong and Salisbury Playhouse’s Snow White and the Happy Ever After Beauty Salon, will play Lady Macbeth.
If generations of school pupils have taught us anything, it is that saying “Macbeth” repeatedly in a classroom carries rather less risk than trying it backstage in a theatre. Grace accepts no responsibility for anyone testing this theory.
Murder is brewing
Later in the season, GSC will move from Shakespearean bloodshed to an entirely different sort of suspicious death with A Brew To A Kill.
The immersive murder mystery runs at Hogs Back Brewery from 24 October to 15 November, inviting audiences to investigate a death discovered on the night of the brewery’s grand relaunch.
A brewery filled with suspects might not be the most efficient environment in which to collect reliable witness statements, but I have every confidence that audiences will approach the investigation with appropriate seriousness.
Probably.
The production follows GSC’s previous immersive adventures Boeing, Boeing, Gone!, staged aboard a real Boeing 747, and The Housetrap, performed at West Horsley Place, the setting used for BBC’s Ghosts.
This time, the company will transform Hogs Back Brewery into the scene of the crime. Audiences will enter the world of the Gloucester family and meet a collection of colourful characters, each caught in the confusion surrounding the mysterious death.
Jack Whitam will play Richard, alongside Emma Fenney as Edwina. Fenney’s credits include EastEnders and Fawlty Towers: The Play.
Robert Maskell, previously seen at the Orange Tree Theatre and Storyhouse, plays local gangster Tommy Tyrell. Laura Smithers, whose credits include GSC’s Macbeth and Sky’s Wicked, appears as rival brewer Anne Prior.
Everyone sounds entirely trustworthy. I am sure the body simply appeared by administrative error.
Twenty years of adventurous theatre
Guildford Shakespeare Company was founded in 2006 and has developed a reputation for placing classic stories in unusual and immersive settings. Its work has travelled across Surrey’s heritage sites, into schools and community spaces, aboard an aircraft and now inside a working brewery.
Alongside its productions, the company delivers more than 29,000 engagement opportunities every year. Over 21,000 of these are funded for people who face barriers to accessing the arts, including young carers, older adults, people experiencing poor mental health and pupils attending less advantaged schools.
Co-founder Matt Pinches said the final season of GSC’s anniversary year captures what the company is about: using drama to challenge perceptions, introducing young people to professional Shakespeare and creating distinctive live experiences within treasured local landmarks.
That combination of imagination and community purpose feels like a fitting way to celebrate twenty years.
Shakespeare’s stories contain feuds, ambition, violence, love, power and terrible decision-making. Guildford Shakespeare Company is using them not simply as museum pieces to be admired from a polite distance, but as living stories capable of opening conversations and welcoming new audiences.
And, occasionally, placing a suspected murderer beside the beer.
Programme information
Put Up Your Swords
21 September to 28 November 2026
guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk/put-up-your-swords
The Play’s The Thing
29 September to 28 November 2026
guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk/outreachtours
A Brew To A Kill
24 October to 15 November 2026
Hogs Back Brewery, Manor Farm, The Street, Tongham, Farnham, GU10 1DE
guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk/murder-mystery-2026
Further information is available from guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk
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