20th Summer Season

Messages

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…“Her Majesty was interested to learn that this year The Chiltern Shakespeare Company is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream which will be held in the grounds of Hall Barn in Beaconsfield, in aid of charity.

… I am to convey The Queen’s warm good wishes to you and to all members of the Chiltern Shakespeare Company for a successful and enjoyable production.”

Mrs Sonia Bonici
Senior Correspondence Officer
Buckingham Palace

“His Royal Highness sends his congratulations on your remarkable achievement, bringing Shakespeare to such a large audience over the years, and sends you his best wishes for a successful production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2008.”

From the Earl of Wessex

“Shakespeare is still our greatest living author. Your work each year gives us proof. With thanks and congratulations now and for the future.”

Terry Hands CBE
Director
Clwyd Theatr Cymru

“I send greetings from the Oregon Shakespeare festival, the United States largest rotating repertory company. We are so proud to have your country’s greatest playwright as our namesake author. This season we are performing ‘a Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for 9 months, and we are tickled to know that you are doing the same play to celebrate your 20th anniversary. We congratulate you and wish you every joy at this impressive milestone. May The Chiltern Shakespeare Company continue to enrich the lives of your greater community for many decades to come!”

Bill Rauch
Artistic Director
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, USA

‘‘Shakespeare reveals our humanity in unsurpassed poetry that calls us on journeys to experience our divine aspirations and animal feelings. Every one of his plays is a mutable landscape that reappears for us to travel in an infinite variety of modes of transport, depending on who makes the journey with whom, and when and where and why. although yale Rep literally sits across an ocean from you, we are, in spirit, with you on that journey, and we salute the 20th anniversary of The Chiltern Shakespeare Company, wishing you and your audiences the transcendent delight of the imaginative travel to which you have all committed yourselves!”

James Bundy
Artistic Director
Yale Repertory Theater, USA

“Congratulations to you on 20 years of The Chiltern Shakespeare Company. best of luck with ‘a Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and I hope that The Chiltern Shakespeare Company enjoys many more years to come.”

Michael Boyd
Artistic Director
Royal Shakespeare Company

“Congratulations on your 20th anniversary performing at Hall Barn. I hope you celebrate in a suitably Shakespearian manner. Warm wishes and good luck to all the cast and crew from all of us at Shakespeare’s Globe.”

Dominic Dromgoole
Artistic Director
Shakespeare’s Globe

“ I am delighted to be able to offer my congratulations to The Chiltern Shakespeare Company on what is a significant milestone in its history. Shakespeare’s work continues to play a unique role in the cultural life of this country and the valuable work of organisations such as The Chiltern Shakespeare Company gives new audiences the opportunity to discover the universal themes and characters contained in his plays. I wish all involved in the The Chiltern Shakespeare Company every success for the 20th anniversary production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream and for a bright future.”

Gordon Brown
Prime Minister

“I am delighted to send my best wishes to everyone attending the production of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, and to all those involved in the Chiltern Shakespeare Company. This is a great opportunity to celebrate all you have achieved over the last 20 productions – the reputation you have built, and the enjoyment you have given to actors and audiences alike in the magnificent setting of Hall Barn. That you have also raised substantial sums for charity does great credit to everyone involved. I am sure this will be an especially memorable Summer Season.”

David Camerson
Leader of the Opposition

“Congratulations on 20 years, and all the best for 20 more in bringing the most contemporary of our playwrights to the stage.”

Nicholas Hytner
Director, The National Theatre

“Shakespeare’s enduring popularity just shows what a fantastic playwright he was. I am always amazed at how quickly modern british audiences of all ages connect with his work. I think this is the grasp of the ‘big’ themes – love, justice, truth, comedy, jealousy, revenge, betrayal, passion – Shakespeare has it all. I am a fan of theatre and a particular fan of Shakespeare having done some acting throughout school and university. I still take part in the occasional Christmas pantomime!”

Nick Clegg
Leader of the Liberal Democrats

“My first introduction to Shakespeare was watching my brothers appear in plays at their school, St. Peters in York – Macbeth and Taming of the Shrew. Seeing Shakespeare performed can be a real inspiration. My best wishes to you all on your 20th Anniversary.”

Dame Judi Dench
Actress


“Shakespeare and Mozart make me think that there might just possibly be a God. I know that your production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ will be better than the one I saw when I was seven in the local Park in Tottenham – and I loved that!”

Dame Eileen Atkins
Actress

“If there is a better way of giving pleasure and raising money for worthy causes than this, I have yet to hear of it. Congratulations on twenty scintillating years.”

Bill Bryson OBE
Author



“Every good wish for your 2008 production.”

Patrick Stewart
Actor


“I sometimes, only half flippantly, say that Shakespeare is the best and worst thing that ever happened to English theatre. The best, because who wouldn’t want to have the world’s greatest dramatist and cartographer of the human heart bestriding one’s theatrical tradition? The worst, because our unhealthy reverence for him (which is not at all the same thing as respect) has led us to treat both his plays (and as a result those of other dramatists) with a lack of practical poetry which is completely at odds with the man himself, who had a theatre company to run, actors to feed and, coincidentally, was a genius. One of the best antidotes to this marble-pedestal reverence is an endeavour such as the Chiltern Shakespeare Company, making the plays come alive in a particular location for a popular audience. Congratulations on the last 20 years and may there be 200 more (at least).”

Edward Kemp
Artistic Director, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art



“At school I was more interested in maths and physics until – at the age of 16 - I went on a school trip and saw Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic. I had never read the play, barely knew of its existence and it capsized me. I was like the composer Berlioz who said after seeing a performance of the same play in Paris: ‘Shakespeare, coming on me unawares, struck me like a thunderbolt. The lightning flash of that discovery revealed to me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest corners. I recognised the meaning of grandeur, beauty, dramatic truth….. I saw, I understood, I felt….. that I was alive and that I must arise and walk.’ To experience a good performance of a Shakespeare play is to experience all that great art can offer – joy, excitement and what King Lear describes as “the mystery of things”.

Sir Richard Eyre
Director



“How is it that Shakespeare understood the human heart so well? All good wishes.”

Zoe Wanamaker CBE
Actress

“After 400 years the language, phraseology and ideas of Shakespeare still toll a universal note in all our lives. His drama is as pertinent to-day as it ever was.”

Brian Cox CBE
Actor

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