The productions are performed in full period costume with live Elizabethan music.
The festival attracts upwards of 25,000 visitors[1] for the productions which take place over a period of eight weeks in July and August.
The ethos of the Company is to provide access to all to Shakespeare's work without any prior knowledge of the play or author, and the Artistic Director has made it a Company policy to avoid unnecessary theatrical artifice and special effects.
To that end the plays are performed without staging or elaborate lighting and the action takes place in and around the space in which the audience sits.
The centrepiece of any production is, therefore, the language - thus returning to Shakespeare's original mode of communication with his audience.