Freyberg and Feilding High Schools to participate in Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival

Feilding High School performs The Taming of the Shrew at last year's Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival. Photo / Brian Scurfield

Groups from Freyberg High School and Feilding High School will be among 48 participating in this year’s Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival.

The five-day festival, encompassing King’s Birthday weekend, is organised by the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand and will be held in Wellington.

The guest assessor is Lucy Cuthbertson, the new director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

Her career spans professional theatre and school drama education. She has more than 20 years’ experience as a head of drama in London state schools and drama director across a multi-academy trust of 13 UK schools.

The other assessors are stage and screen actor Theresa Healey and Ben Ashby, actor/director and former director of Long Cloud Youth Theatre.

The first Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ Festival of Shakespeare in Schools was held in 1992.

“Close reading, creativity, collaboration, communication are just a few of the plethora of qualities which are enhanced,” chief executive Dawn Sanders said.

“Rising to the challenge of re-imagining Shakespeare’s works in so many ways gets their imaginary forces working, as well as, for the many student directors, management of their project, peers and time.”

The prizegiving will be MCed by former Palmerston North Boys’ High School students Eli Hancock and Jacob Waugh, who visited London in 2023 as part of the Young Shakespeare Company.

Freyberg will perform a five-minute scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Feilding a 15-minute scene from Macbeth.