Our Educational Programme is a huge part of this project with influences on the arts and production programme and the community support policy.

The formulation of this policy happened in a very simple way. We were all pupils once, and in the case of some of the company members, not that long ago, many had graduated with full degrees and professional qualifications, and some of us had become fully fledged teachers in our own right. So we started off by asking some really basic questions:

· What was good about drama and English classes at school?
· What was not so good?
· What was missing?
· What did we need?
· What would have been helpful?

Our objective was to create something not to replace the classroom but to enhance it, to offer new perspectives, professional outlooks from actors, directors and technicians, that would show new angles from which to look at the productions.

The most common complaints turned out to be the most obvious. Classrooms are rarely fun, inspiring places that move a student to enthusiasm, especially in terms of period pieces where archaic language presents what seems, to the young mind at least, to be an insurmountable obstacle. Comprehension is difficult if the language is incomprehensible, but all of this becomes immaterial if the production is on stage, because suddenly the language does not seem like an alien tongue since people who understand the way in which it should work are using it. Also, rather than a stilted and clumsy reading, what is being served up is a full three dimensional, technicolour vision of what is on the written page. The classroom fails completely to bring a play to life. Plays were never meant to be read, they were meant to be watched, and in order for a play to reach its final stage of life, it must be put into production to achieve that full three-dimensionality necessary to completely grasp what a play is about. A production is a full example of how a play should sound as well as look.

This is especially true of period pieces, where the language offers as many obstacles as the plot, themes, and characters, and can pose problems even to the professional actor. Also the rhyme and metre are not easy for children to understand, so classroom readings are often stilted, stuggled and forced and tedious.