ABSTRACT
Although I did not know it at the time, my acquaintance with the Shakespeare North Playhouse (SNP) started at the Lancastrian Shakespeare conference in 1999 where, as a fresh-faced PhD student, I heard Professor Richard Wilson introduce the project detailing why a new playhouse was needed. A Shakespeare Centre for the North, complete with conference venue and library – at Hoghton Tower, Lancashire – the Centre would rival the Globe in London and would greatly widen the availability of the study and performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Like the Globe, Wilson’s brainchild took decades to materialise or to be made visible. The next time our paths crossed, I joined the team of postgraduate researchers at Kingston Shakespeare, led by Wilson, and I was invited to contribute to some of the planning sessions on the architectural features of the new theatre, now destined for Prescot. I was also lucky enough to have been able to discuss many questions relating to the SNP project with Nicholas Helm, its architect. The most important thing I learnt from witnessing the process of the birth of the SNP over the years is that, like all replica theatres, it is not a solution to the questions that brought it into existence but a physical expression of them.
