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Play to Be Recreated After 480 Years in Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace

Drama last performed before Henry VIII

A Tudor drama that was probably last performed in front of Henry VIII in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace 480 years ago is to be recreated thanks to the ingenuity of academics from the University of Leicester and Oxford Brookes University.

John Heywood's courtly play, 'The Play of the Weather', written around 1532, will be performed by a professional theatre company led by Gregory Thompson, Director of Tron Theatre, Glasgow.

The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), aims to perform selected scenes from the play in the Great Hall as part of an experiment that aims to produce a full-scale production of the play in the Hall during 2009, the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession to the throne.

Professor Greg Walker of the Department of English at the University of Leicester and Dr Tom Betteridge of Oxford Brookes University, aim to use the production workshop to explore its original social and material contexts.

Professor Walker said, 'This is a remarkable opportunity for two scholars of Early Theatre to try something really exciting and genuinely cutting edge in its experimentation.

"You can only learn so much from reading a play or seeing it performed in the kinds of theatrical space available in modern theatres. Thanks to the generosity of the AHRC in funding our collaboration with Historic Royal Palaces we are going to have the chance to take the play back to its origins in the principal palace of Henry VIII.

"We know that the play contains a number of subtle allusions to contemporary politics and the social conditions of the period - not least some sly remarks about the King's religious policy and his recent marriage to Anne Boleyn, which was still a closely guarded secret at the time the play was produced; but how many more references to the palace and the court there are may well become apparent when we try to fit the action to the spaces for which it was originally written."

The performance will take place on May 10 before an invited audience of historians, literary scholars, and experts from Historic Royal Palaces.

The Great Hall at Hampton Court is the only great hall purpose built by Henry VIII, and thanks to careful conservation it remains substantially the same space today that it was in John Heywood's day, or when Shakespeare's company played before King James VI 70 years later.

Greg Walker is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Leicester and is the author of numerous studies of Tudor literature and history, including, The Politics of Performance of Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Writing Under Tyranny: English literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University press, 2005). He has also edited a comprehensive edition of Early English Drama: Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2000).

Dr Tom Betteridge is Reader in Early Modern English Literature at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of, among others, Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2004) and Shakespeare: Fantasy and Politics (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001)

Gregory Thompson is Director of Tron Theatre, Glasgow; and his work includes As You Like It (Royal Shakespeare Company); Henry VIII (AandBC/RSC Complete Works); The Tempest (AandBC, performances in Honk Kong, Polan, Romania, Russia, Trinidad, USA)

THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL: Each year the AHRC provides approximately £90 million to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,500 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. Arts and humanities researchers constitute nearly a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector. The quality and range of research supported not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.

NOTE TO NEWSDESK: For more information, please contact

Greg Walker, University of Leicester: gmw4@le.ac.uk

Elaine Bible, Oxford Brookes press office 01865 484452

Ather Mirza, University of Leicester press office -0116 252 3335; pressoffice@le.ac.uk