About us
The Lions part was formed by a group of professional actors who met doing First Folio work with the Original Shakespeare Company.
The core members include performers and a musician, and several of the group write, produce and direct as well as perform. Our experience as individual actors spans every kind of theatre, including the major stages and companies. We love verse and music old and new, celebration, costume, the seasons - above all, theatre.Our first much-loved and much-missed patron was the veteran verse playwright Christopher Fry, several of whose plays we have performed. We had the sad honour of performing at his memorial at the Chichester Festival Theatre.
Sir Mark Rylance (formerly Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe) is our current patron, and our relationship with the Globe has been warm and fruitful. We have performed on the Globe main stage and often work in and around the building.
Twice a year we perform on the Bankside in our free theatre-based seasonal festivals, October Plenty and Twelfth Night, which celebrate the seasons with games, old customs, music, dance and the Green Man in his various guises, with performances of early plays such asThe Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, Gammer Gurton's Needle, translations of Hans Sachs' Nonsense-night plays and new adaptation of some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales . The company had a great success with its devised piece based on the stories of Land Girls, Lilies on the Land, and after 3 national tours and a West End run at The Arts Theatre, the play has now been published by Nick Hern Books. We performed Marlowe's Doctor Faustus on the archaeological remains of the Rose Theatre, and produced an entire season of theatre on the Isle of Man, including Shakespeare, storytelling, and a new commissioned outdoor community musical.
We have extensive contacts built up through our many interests, including food producers, street theatre performers, storytellers, pressure groups, re-enactors, societies, writers, dancers, photographers and musicians.
