“Thank you all for your continued support of The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. This is YOUR Festival and we look forward to performing for you again this year. We welcome your feedback and suggestions, too, so feel free to contact me via this website with anything you’d like us to know or with any comments you’d like to make on our work”.
Dr David Crilly
Artistic Director
[email protected]
About the Festival
The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is a non-commercial, cultural and artistic collaboration between like-minded people who share a passion for theatre, and Shakespeare in particular. As a not-for-profit social enterprise we are dedicated to enriching cultural life, strengthening community connection and supporting artistic development. Our productions present Shakespeare’s plays in a way that is modern in energy yet informed by authentic theatrical practice, using minimal sets and lighting, traditional Elizabethan costuming and open-air performance in historic settings. Each summer we present a carefully curated mix of comedies, tragedies and histories, offering a season that reflects the full range of Shakespeare’s storytelling and ensures that audiences with different tastes, backgrounds and levels of familiarity can find work that resonates with them.
We keep our productions widely accessible through affordable ticket prices, free workshops for local schools, and charity matinees that raise funds for national and local causes. Each year, thirty professional actors voluntarily offer their time, skills and expertise, enabling the Festival to realise its cultural and social aims by keeping performances accessible and sustaining the community-focused activities through which we serve the public.
Over the last four decades the Festival has acquired a national profile and an international following, with visitors coming from all over the world each year. Since 2019 we have developed special links with China and in both 2025 and 2026 took A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night on a tour of twelve cities in the country.
… a tour de force… as hilarious as anything you would see at the RSC
An evening at the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is a unique experience. Prior to the performance, members of the audience can picnic in this idyllic setting, before sitting back to enjoy an evening of dynamic and highly visual theatre. The Festival prides itself on an artistic policy which strips away unnecessary theatrical artifice and gimmickry, and the Company exists to provide access for all to these marvellous works without assuming any prior knowledge of the author or the play in question.
The productions themselves are vivid and spectacular, and are performed in full period costume with live Elizabethan music. Imperceptibly the evening passes from a glorious summer evening to dusk and then to night. The moon rises to provide additional lighting in a way that no theatre could match. Following the performance the audiences from each venue return to the heart of Cambridge and its many bars and restaurants to end a perfect evening.