Other Touring Highlights

Over the last 25 years, Classworks Theatre has provided a range of touring productions for young audiences.  Below we have highlighted a few of those projects.  For a full timeline of our productions click on the link on the left.

How Many Miles To Babylon? (Eastern Region)

Devised and performed by Rowan Wylie and Andrew Matthews.
Script development by Mike Levy.
Directed by Jenny Culank.

Two travellers arrive in a deserted place. They set up camp. They tell stories, sing songs, tell jokes and perform rituals. Tomorrow their search continues for the Tower of Babble. They hope to find the secret of the language everyone can understand. They think it could exist…

She is Lady Augusta Syllable-Hunter, famous explorer and collector of rare stories. A truly larger than life character, she carries everything she needs from tent to toothpick about her person. He is her long-suffering travelling companion Um. What he lacks in sense he makes up for in versatility: humming and strumming, chiming and rhyming, banging and twanging.

How Many Miles To Babylon? is an exciting new way of performing stories at any time and in any place, incorporating live music, puppetry, language, improvisation, nonsense and audience interaction.

Farmer Giles of Ham (Eastern Region)

by J.R.R. Tolkien adapted by Nick Warburton

Farmer Giles of Ham was specially adapted for Classworks by Nick Warburton and toured the Eastern region in 2002, visiting theatres, museums, gardens and community centres. The show was preceded by workshops in local primary schools and young people were incorporated into the play, writing their own script for allocated slots.

The production was supported by the Regional Arts Lottery Programme of East England Arts, now Arts Council, East.

And Then They Came For Me (National & Northern Ireland)

by James Still

And Then They Came For Me, by James Still toured in 2000 and re-toured in 2001 mainly to secondary schools and arts venues, nationally (including Northern Ireland). Workshops and discussion groups were held after performances.
“The lives of a whole generation of young people have been cut short or otherwise tragically marked by the holocaust.  The play focuses on the lives and families of Anne Frank, two of her surviving friends and of a Hitler Youth.  History is made vividly real.I am one of the survivors, whose testimony, together with that of Ed Silverberg’s is the subject of the play, which has been shown widely and successfully in the USA.  Its arrival in this country is a dream come true.”
Eva Schloss 

Beneath the Surface (Cambridge)

Directed by Jenny Culank.
Design Anna Townley and Charlotte Peel.  Costume Sue Pearson.  Curator Idit Nathan.  Soundscape Andrew Lovett.

Beneath The Surface was a year long multi media project, bringing together artists and archaeologists with members of the community. The project was based on the fact that Arbury is built on top of a substantial Roman agricultural settlement. The performance looked at fragments of lives, how we use them to piece together our histories, how what we leave behind are bits and pieces of a life for others to put together.  The project used letter, diaries and photographs based on the lives of real people.

The Children (National)

By Edward Bond.
Directed by Claudette Bryanston.

The Chldren was written by Edward Bond for Classworks and supported with funding by Arts Council England. The tour in 2000, consisted of a four day residency in schools, with a performance in an arts venue on day five. The piece was aimed at 14-17 year olds with parts written into the play for young people.  The play’s first participants were pupils of Manor Community College in Cambridge.

“The play describes a journey, one which could start from any modern town.  But it is also the very ancient journey that all humans have had to go on since we first wanted to understand ourselves and take responsibility for our world.  The play is like a map of the ancient rite of passage - the journey through fire, water, earth and air.  The journey must take us through both our social world and our mental and emotional world, or we spend our lives wandering and lost.  The play does not describe the journey abstractly, but creates the experience of the journey through the intense concentration which is the secret of drama.  In the modern, technological world, this journey is even more essential to our humaneness.  Our cultural media deny us our experiences in the very process which claims to fulfil it.  They young people who go  on the journey in The Children, are the only ones who can save themselves - helped perhaps by adults who have also made the journey and learnt to replace revenge with justice, anger with care.”
Edward Bond

The Heart of a Dog (Cambridge, Edinburgh & London)

by Mikhail Bulgakov
Adaptation by Richard Spaul & Richard Fredman
Translation by Sarah Schechter.
Directed by Jenny Culank & Claudette Bryanston.
Choreography Liz Hale. Design Paul Wilkins. Music Duncan Stafford.

A starving mongrel dog is roaming the streets of Moscow, 1925, scientist Professor Preobrazhensky takes pity on him and restores him to health before using the dog in a experimental transplant operation whereby the brains and genital organs of a dying man are transplanted into the dog.  The dog survives the operation to become a man of gross habits and offensive behaviour.  What is more, he begins to make demands for his rights.  The Professor is faced with a seemingly impossible situation…

Heart of a Dog was performed at Southside, August 15-27 1988 at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won The Independent Award for The Best Production on The Fringe.