About Us

What We Do
We bring vibrant Shakespeare and other excellent theatre to junior and senior high schools around the province of Alberta through our Artists-In-Residence programmes. The students in the schools we visit get to act in these plays with our professionals. There is funding available from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to support our visit to your school. We can come for an entire day, several days, or even two weeks. The longer we stay, the more acting your students can do in the play, and the more we can work with them on their character, their movement, voice, and releasing the power of Shakespeare’s language in them.

Students who want to be involved but don’t want to act can take on a range of technical duties.

Many of the students that we have worked with in the last decade and a half have gone on to make considerable contributions to the arts and arts education. We don’t just create art in your school, we help to create artists in the community at large.

Our scripts are faithful to the originals, but edited down to 75 to 120 minute pieces. Children as young as 7 have sat in rapt attention at our productions.

We can also bring to life non-Shakespearean plays such as Euripides’ The Bacchae, and Trojan Women, as well as Ted Hughes’ The Coming of the Kings.

Our Mandate
To provide innovative and affordable classical theatre for student and community audiences, and to provide high-level training and performance opportunities for teenagers.

Where We Are, Whom We Serve
We are based in Edmonton, Alberta, with office and performance spaces on 118th Avenue. We provide single- and multi-day and multi-week Artist-in-Residence programs for junior and senior high schools around the province. We have also performed for Edmonton elementary school children and the general public, including Fringe Festival audiences.

Our Main Goals and Artistic Objectives

• To keep Shakespeare’s works alive as a tool people can use to explore and celebrate what it means to be human.
• To make them accessible to modern audiences in their local cultures without watering down the content.
• To celebrate and bring to immediate life other works that deal with great themes about humans as individuals and societies.

Our Role in the Arts Community
Our primary role is in arts education and audience development. We like to give young performers a chance to fly. Many of our student performers keep coming back to our projects in increasingly challenging roles. We believe that putting faith in youth can only have positive psychological and sociological repercussions.

Company History
2011
We shall be carrying out our spring tour to Alberta schools with our single- and multi-day residencies of Macbeth and The Tempest. We are also preparing for our third Serca Festival and the first of what we hope also to be an annual festival of mythic theatre and other performances.

2010

In the spring we brought back A Midsummer Night’s Dream, much to the delight of Alberta schools, and put on the amazing King Lear as well. Over the summer we continued with our Serca Festival of Irish Theatre, performing Stewart Parker’s Spokesong and presenting other Irish plays in the old Alberta Cycle building on 118 Avenue. In the fall we began production and performance of Macbeth, to which we are adding The Tempest for the spring of 2011.

2009

Over the 2008/2009 season we toured Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet in repertory to Alberta schools.  We also participated in Workshop West’s Canoe Festival in January with Maggie Now Part One, and in February launched our annual Serca Festival of Irish Theatre.

2008

Romeo and Juliet toured to Alberta schools, along with multi-day residencies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Both plays featured some of Edmonton’s most exciting and versatile actors. We also enjoyed great success at the 2008 International Fringe Theatre Festival with Maggie Now Parts Three and Four.

2007

At the 2007 Edmonton International Fringe Festival, Theatre Prospero and the Prosperous Paddies Co-op built on their earlier success with Maggie Now Part One to bring the audience two hits: a richer Part One and the new Part Two. September saw first performances of Theatre Prospero’s second new work in two years, Blood Opera:  The Raven Tango Poems featuring text by Edmonton poet Jannie Edwards, images by Paul Saturely, tango choreography by Kathleen Ochoa, performances by Jennifer Spencer and Calvin Malaka, and direction and poeturgy by Mark Henderson

2006
At the Edmonton Fringe Festival we staged a hugely successful production of Jennifer Spencer’s play Maggie Now, Part one. This production, set in 19th- and early 20th-century New York, took Theatre Prospero in a new direction with a non-classical production. originating with our residencies last year – during we helped create a new musical for one of our client schools – Theatre Prospero announced plans to continue exploring styles and periods of theatre beyond Shakespeare, as well as committing to the staging of Maggie Now Parts two and three.

2005
We performed our new production of Hamlet at the Edmonton Fringe festival, yet again with a hugely enthusiastic group of student apprentices. We continue touring our highly successful productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth, as well as a major tour of Hamlet, to a total of over seventy schools across Alberta.

2004
We performed a highly successful  student-participation production of Macbeth at the Emonton Fringe Festival. The same production toured to over forty Alberta Schools by May 2005, rehearsing students into the play in mornings, and then performing it with them for their peers in the afternoon. We also continued to tour our hugely successful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

2003
We performed an audience-participation production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Fringe Festival to critical and audience acclaim. The same production toured to thirty-six Alberta schools by  May of 2004, rehearsing students into the play in mornings, and then performing it with them for their peers in the afternoon.

2002
In the spring we had three successful artists in residence programs of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ranging from 5 to 15 days at Altario School, Buck Mountain Central and Youngstown School with between 50 and 150 active participants at each school involving students from K-12 and community members.

2001
In the fall we toured Alberta with our highly successful one-day workshop/performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Five professional actors and up to 30 students presented the show to student and community audiences after a three hour workshop. The tour was supported by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA).
Our AFA-funded spring residency at St. Joseph’s High School in Edmonton spanned almost 8 weeks and brought together over 200 students from Drama, Industrial Arts, English, Religious Studies, Philosophy, A.V. and Music. Students re-wrote The Bacchae into a modern setting, featuring a chorus of ravers and their guru pitted against a neo-conservative regime and its fascistic leader. They incorporated live video feed news reports and modern music. The production featured student-designed costumes, sound, set and props. It was a very successful integration of many of this school’s special programs into an excellent modern telling of an ancient yet relevant tale.

1999-2000
The Taming of the Shrew – Student participation production generously co-sponsored by the Stanley Milner Library. In November 2000 we had over 2000 students out to see our highly successful production.
The Bacchae – three-week, AFA-funded Artists in Residence program at Ross Shepherd High School that focused on Euripides’ tale. Students from these residences (and from open auditions) were recruited to take part in the completely separate AFA-funded production of the play, which we mounted in May of 2000.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a two-week, AFA-funded Artists in Residence Program at Laurier Heights Elementary-Junior High. Areas of instruction included acting, voice, movement, design, stage management, ensemble work, story telling, music and writing.
The Second Shepherds’ Play – Our first foray into the field of mediæval drama was at McDougall United Church in December.

1998
In October and November we teamed up with The Nataraja Studio to co-produce Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet in repertory for over 3,500 students at the Arts Barns Open Space. Much Ado About Nothing marked our fourth Shakespeare since March 1994 with a mixed cast of student and professional actors. In December we did a two-week Artists-in-Residence program at Laurier Heights Elementary-Junior High focusing on Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. It featured a cast of a quarter thousand.

1996-1997
The Tempest (1997), which reached an audience of over 1,600; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996), which played to 1,500 students over a five-day run.