Shakespeare returns home: Shropshire Youth Theatre to perform 'As You Like It' at Soulton Hall
This May, after nearly 500 years, a foundational piece of Shropshire’s heritage returns to the soil where it all began: The Shropshire Youth Theatre (SYT) senior production company will present a landmark staging of 'As You Like It' at Soulton Hall, bringing the play back to the landscape that shaped it.
The play is famously set in the Forest of Arden, and it is a matter of documents and biography that the roots of the text are firmly planted here in Shropshire: without Soulton, the play as we know it could not exist, and more than anywhere else on earth, this is the place and these are the lives that inspired Shakespeare’s vision.
The performance will be held outdoors, honouring the 16th-century custom of how theatre would have been staged at Soulton Hall during the time of the monumental statesman and polymath Old Sir Rowland Hill, a cousin of Shakespeare's mother Mary Arden.
However, the creative direction belongs entirely to Shropshire’s young people. Reframing this homecoming through the lens of 1994, the cast is taking the stories of this landscape and making them speak to their present. Under their control, the Forest is reimagined as a site of sanctuary and radical joy.
In the 1550s, the woods of Soulton were a sanctuary for those escaping a political emergency, which is an identical context for the action of the play.
It is therefore this same energy that is being recovered in this creative direction and is explored in Shakespeare's play and the earlier source text penned by a son of Soulton.
By bringing the action forward to the 90s, this fresh take reframes the Forest of Arden as a space of new hope and revelry, using the energy of that era's music culture to mirror the freedom found in the woods by the exiled court. This youthful, vibrant adaptation demonstrates that, even in times of strife, love and creativity provide opportunities to rethink our place in the world.
The link between the play and this ground is established through definitive historical ties. Soulton is the estate of Sir Rowland Hill, the Elizabethan statesman memorialised in the play as Old Sir Rowland, the moral father-figure of the drama. Furthermore, the deeds to Soulton Hall establish that the primary source for the play, Rosalynde (1590), was written by Thomas Lodge. As his father held the manor of Soulton before the Hills, Lodge was a son of Soulton, anchoring the story’s origins in this specific house.
The play concludes with a Dance of Harmony, a resolution mirrored in the estate's physical heritage. The Soulton Pavement, a 19th-century encoded floor constructed to remember lost coded ceilings, represents this very search for social order—a dance toward peace.
For those who wish to see the production in an indoor setting before it arrives at its ancestral home, SYT will also perform at the Walker Theatre, Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury from March 24 to 26.
The outdoor performance at Soulton Hall takes place on Friday, May 8 at 6.30pm. Tickets for the Soulton performance are available via the What's On section of the Soulton Hall website, while tickets for the Shrewsbury preview can be found via the Theatre Severn box office. This production is kindly supported by the Co-op, Virtual Shropshire, and MA Creative.
In 2026, these grounds remain a place for the Shropshire community to gather, recover harmony, and find our own rhythm. This is a local story, directed and told by our youth, on Shropshire ground.
