Guildford Shakespeare Company are announcing their return to the stage with their postponed open-air season from last year, featuring She Stoops To Conquer and As You Like It.
Surrey’s award-winning theatre company kick-off their outdoor season in June with Oliver Goldsmith’s sublime Georgian comedy of manners, one of the best-loved and most-performed of English comedies.
She Stoops To Conquer takes place over the course of a single night, when a when Marlow, a debonair man-about-town, is led to believe that his future bride’s rural family home (the Hardcastles, whom he has never met), is in fact a country inn. When confronted with the elegant Kate Hardcastle, Marlow’s swagger melts away, and so to conquer his heart and keep up the pretence, the tenacious Kate poses as a barmaid.
Director Tom Littler, Artistic Director of Jermyn Street Theatre, London, returns to Guildford following his 2019 production of All’s Well That Ends Well (‘A beautiful, magical production. 5 stars doesn’t do it justice.’ – London Theatre 1), which was GSC’s first London transfer, and was nominated for five Off-West Awards.
This production transports the play to the ‘bright young things’ country house world of Jeeves and Wooster, complete with fearsome aunts, hapless young men, determined debutantes and hilarious misunderstandings.
In July, the company moves to the former chalk quarry in Guildford’s town centre for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Now a luscious green, wooded space, Racks Close will be a fitting setting for Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden and its free-thinking heroine, Rosalind. Possibly Shakespeare’s happiest play and containing some of his most memorable lines and phrases, As You Like It is a sunny celebration of human nature’s desire to forgive and forget, to love and to laugh.
Matt Pinches (GSC Co-Founder and Producer): “Like all theatres and theatre company’s we have been waiting for this moment when we can finally be with our audiences once again, in person. Being able to announce a return to the stage and the open-air is a huge gear-change for us all and we cannot wait to welcome people back, safely and securely. We are so looking forward to sharing the joys of live performance once again, and these two fabulously frivolous feel-good plays will be the perfect tonic.”
She Stoops to Conquer runs 17 June – 3 July and As You Like It 19 – 31 July. Full details and tickets can be found here.
