In September 2014, the V&A acquired the Peter Brook Collection. Peter Brook is one of Britain’s greatest living directors and over the course of his career has produced ground-breaking plays, films and operas. Thanks to funding from the HLF and a private donor, the museum is rehousing and cataloguing the materials in the collection to make them available to researchers, practitioners and students.

The HLF are also funding what promises to be an exciting schools’ outreach project which will marry these important heritage materials with practical performance work in the classroom.

Six partnership hubs are being developed across London in Lewisham, Kingston, Redbridge, Ealing & Hounslow, Croydon & Bromley and Newham. Each partnership is made up of a school, a local museum or gallery and a theatre venue and will support a group of students to work together, inspired by one of Brook’s key productions, to produce an original one-act performance piece which will be brought to the V&A on 23 April 2016.

One of Watermans’ key aims is to support young people’s skills development through building partnerships with arts organisations, schools and museums.

We are delighted to be working with the V&A, Chiswick School and Gunnersbury Museum to produce a piece of devised theatre inspired by director Peter Brook’s archive. The partnership will result in a high-quality performance that will be performed on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death at the V&A, then tour to Watermans and Gunnersbury Museum. It’s exciting to see outer London organisations working with a major international museum to inspire young people in theatre.
Evaluation will follow for this project in Summer 2016.