Sport for Jove's Education Season
"Give me your hands, if we be friends..."
Sport for Jove’s Creative Producer Chris Tomkinson reports on the Sydney company’s dynamic 2026 Education Season.
Bring your students. Bring their questions. Bring their wonder. It’s a season that balances play and rigour —the heart of what we do.
So, whether they are tumbling headfirst into the forest of The Dream, staring down the moral abyss of Macbeth, or ripping open the complex corners of the canon in our expanded symposia, we believe this season will meet them with the intelligence and imagination they deserve.
As always, it is a privilege to keep building a space where young people discover that Shakespeare and theatre is not an artefact but an experience.
This year, we’re inviting schools and young audiences into three major creative offerings:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – An Imagination of the Australian Forest.
Miranda Middleton is bringing a clarity of vision to A Midsummer Night’s Dream that comes from her deep passion for the play, which reminds us why this play is one of Shakespeare’s most enduring gifts to humanity.
This production will joyfully Illuminate a story with a profound emotional heart opening the world of the forest of Athens for young audiences.
What she’s crafting for Dream is a world full of transformation —a forest that is alive with mischief, beauty, and the wild unpredictability that sits just beneath the surface of our lives.
The forest is full of youth striving for freedom, the old struggling for control, and a planet in turmoil.
This production will be colourful, theatrical, drawing out conversations about love, power, and the mysterious wonder of being alive.
Offering students a gateway into Shakespeare through physical comedy, music, and the thrill of seeing familiar ideas turned by magic, on their heads.
The return of George Banders’ Macbeth (April-June) offers a production that speaks straight to students.
Teachers have consistently told us it unlocks the play for students in a direct, visceral way.
It’s fast, it’s clear, and it never loses sight of the human heartbeat beneath the supernatural dread.
George’s vision engages with the play’s emotional truths: the pressure of ambition, the collapse of trust, the inescapability of consequence and places it in a world suffused with the youthful energy of children, through which we see the loss at the heart of the Macbeth’s relationship.
Students engage because it speaks their language —not by modernising the text, but by committing wholly to storytelling that is embodied, muscular, and morally alive.
We’re excited to offer this touchstone production again and continue the rich conversations that it elicits with students whose curiosity is piqued by the vibrant life breathed into this story.
An Expanded Symposia Program (March-June) – New Texts, New Ideas, New Understanding.
One of the great joys of the last decade has been watching the symposium series become a cornerstone of how schools engage with Shakespeare and great works from the 20th century Australian and world theatrical cannon.
In 2026, we are widening that doorway even further because students deserve the full breadth of Shakespeare’s imagination, and the opportunity to experience contemporary texts more fully.
And when we offer them big, bold theatrical provocations —with rich poetry, contrasting interpretations, physical dramaturgy, and deeper inquiry into how form shapes meaning —they rise to meet us every time.
This year’s program will take students deeper into the language and characters of our plays and realise fresh and theatrically ambitious presentations of key moments.
These symposia are designed not only to illuminate Shakespeare but to empower students as thinkers. To show them that theatre is a living process, not a finished product. We challenge them to form their own opinions and responses and sift the script for the evidence that supports and shapes their reactions.
Join us! Come and enjoy these offerings with your students – give us your hands and come and say hello afterwards [if you don’t have to rush straight off to the bus]. We love the opportunity to enrich your students’ studies and see their faces lit up with inspiration.
https://www.sportforjove.com.au/education
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is at Riverside April 30 – May 9. Seymour Centre May 20 – 29. Orange June 4.
