Collaborations with the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival in 2025
As part of our ongoing collaboration with the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, we have several exciting projects coming up in 2025. It has always been a driving ethos behind Cam Rivers Publishing to expand cultural exchange and understanding between China and the UK, and what better way to do so than by widening access to our most extraordinary playwright? Building on the success of past educational and theatrical projects with the Festival, this year we will have a full spectrum of activities to introduce Chinese university students to William Shakespeare’s work as well as give them expert guidance on acting and performing.
The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival was started back in 1987 by David Crilly, and since then it has grown to become a ubiquitous feature of summertime in Cambridge, attracting as many as 25,000 visitors to the city each year. Every summer, a collection of Shakespeare plays are performed outside in the college gardens, allowing audiences into these ordinarily private and secluded spots of nature in the centre of Cambridge. Not only are these plays performed in the open air, harking back to the roofless theatres of Shakespeare’s England, but they are staged in full Elizabethan dress and with early modern musical accompaniment.
To learn more about the Festival and to see this year’s programme click here.
In China…
This Spring, a group of actors from the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival along with David Crilly will be touring universities around China. After several successful tours in past years, Crilly and the actors will be returning to showcase their performances and introduce hundreds of students to the world of Shakespeare, as well as providing workshops to encourage them to explore acting themselves.
We are also working on reproducing some of the bard’s most beloved texts as children’s books for a popular educational app, to get young Chinese people acquainted with the English language through our most famous stories.
In Cambridge…
In the summer of 2024, we hosted a group of Chinese university students on an intensive week-long course on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, concluding with a performance in King’s College Fellow’s Garden. This echoed the performances of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival itself, and so taught the students not only about Shakespeare, stagecraft, and acting, but also about the special challenges of performing outside in the beautiful setting of our college gardens.
The international trip was preceded by weeks of educational guidance to prepare the students for their opening night. This took the form of lectures from David Crilly, Alan Macfarlane, Simon Bell, and Peter Hughes, to introduce them to different aspects of the history, language, and staging of Shakespeare plays. We also provided tuition on the language, including pronunciation, rhyme and rhythm, and translation.
Based on the success of last year’s programme, this summer we will be repeating it with an even larger group of students!
Our past collaborations with the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival
In 2024, we recorded a documentary with the Director and Founder of the Festival, David Crilly, to discuss his career in drama and the value in sharing the arts across the continents. This film was released through People’s Daily Online as part of our ongoing Our China Stories project, which explores the ways Western creatives, scholars, and diplomats have collaborated with China. Read the full article here and see the other Our China Stories documentaries here.
The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival has previously toured China, in 2019, 2023, and 2024, so we are excited to continue the tradition of bringing these experts in Renaissance drama to Asia and helping to educate and entertain. Read about our inaugural tour with the Festival back in 2019 here.
We have previously published a book on the Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu and his hometown Fuzhou. Based on several journeys to the southern Chinese city, the authors discuss literature and culture, religion and nature. Comparisons are made with the Chinese playwright and his faraway contemporary, William Shakespeare, both of whom died in the year 1616. These essays offer stimulating impressions on cultural exchange, tradition in the 21st century, and the place of the humanities in a changing world.
You can purchase this book online here.