Guest Blog: Director Tatty Hennessy On SHAKESPEARE IN THE SQUARES

The squares themselves are the biggest challenge and delight of these productions. They're absolutely beautiful, totally individual and not designed for performances at all.

We keep light on our feet with a stripped-back set, minimal lighting and no recorded sound or amplification. We have to be the most interesting thing in the square, so a clear, bright design concept that we can convey immediately through costume and characterisation works wonders.

The company and I have a lot of fun transplanting the characters from Shakespeare's time into a more modern setting. This year, we're bringing Glastonbury to Arden, setting the story in Britain on the cusp of the Seventies.

As You Like It is so much about escape, about challenging the way we live in nature and love each other. It's full of music and song and spirited freethinkers escaping from society to the woods, putting the world to rights. It asks big, brilliant questions about what it means to be a woman or a man and what roles we play.

I love the layering of ideas and times - how the original setting, the world of our production and the world of the audience chime and inform each other, how we see parallels and echoes through history. Familiar characters take on new significance.

This is compounded by our casting. Several male characters have been refigured as women and Arden becomes a totally female space, a commune of women living together apart from society.

Our composer, Richard Baker, and movement director Yarit Dor make sure the play sounds and feels brilliantly of the era, and our designer Emily Stuart has decked everyone out in stunning and characterful period clothes - including not one but four Seventies wedding dresses.

The most important element of the production is the audience. In rehearsals, we give them a name and specify exactly what each character's relationship with them is, include them in every beat and reaction, share the onstage world completely.

We get a mixed bag of people coming to our shows, from Shakespeare buffs to people who've never seen any, and the first priority for us is telling the story clearly. As You Like It has an awful lot of story. It just keeps coming. There are new stories starting every other scene, so it's massively important that we do rigorous work on the text to make it clear.

These productions are a coming together of people from across the city, to sit in pockets of nature together and share an old story told in a new way - hopefully in a way that moves them, that makes them smile and feel and think. And there's a bit with a sheep. What more could you want?

Find dates and venues for Shakespeare in the Squares here

Photo credit: James Millar Photography

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