'How do we think about identity in ways that don't reflect anxiety, fear of the other, uncritical adulation of our past and all the other pitfalls that surround this subject? The Redcrosse project manages to negotiate these difficulties with immense imaginative energy and honesty: no sour notes, no attempt to overcompensate by desperately overapologetic rhetoric, simply a recovery of deep roots and generous vision. As much as it takes its cue from Spenser, it's a contemporary working out of some of the great and inexhaustible legacy of Blake, a unique contribution to what is often a pretty sterile discussion of who we are in these islands.'
Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, UK
On the evening of Saturday the 17th of November the Royal Shakespeare Company will be performing *Redcrosse*, the new poetic liturgy for England and St George which Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) wrote with the major poets Jo Shapcott, Michael Symmons Roberts and Andrew Motion, and the theologian Andrew Shanks, as part of a multi-grant-winning academic project. *Redcrosse* got considerable national press last year, in *The Guardian*, on radio and television, and even in *The Daily Star*, when it was performed in Windsor Castle and Manchester Cathedral. Its RSC production in the modernist masterpiece of Coventry Cathedral will be its most dramatic and exciting instantiation to date, taking its audience on an exciting and affirming adventure into what England is and could be. Don’t miss it!
For further details and tickets, please see the link below.
http://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/goldenjubilee/EVENTDETAIL2.php?event_id_choice=19400
A book of the project will also be launched on the 17th:
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=167726&SubjectId=1080&Subject2Id=1246.
