The Book of Will

The Book of Will

★★★★★

As part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, Shakespeare North Playhouse are staging Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will.

Telling the tale of how the First Folio came to be, and how so many of Shakespeare’s plays only survive due to the efforts of those who knew him best, The Book of Will is a fantastic co-production with Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch and Octagon Theatre Bolton.

The Book of Will takes the audience on the journey of The King’s Men and their realisation that as each of them dies so to do the real words of Shakespeare, and with each passing the mis-remembered words and modified versions become the truth. As each version moves further away from how Shakespeare would have intended, The King’s Men decide to gather The Bard’s works in order to publish them in a folio. There’s just one problem; the majority of the works haven’t been written down. Those that are written down largely exist as individual scripts for actors and cover purely their lines and cues. The King’s Men must band together to try and find complete works that they can publish.