Macbeth

What's new in this Shakespeare? What's it doing that's so different? In Declan Donnellan's production there are no daggers or blood. It's austere and concise. Simply wonderful.

- Marcos Ordónez, El País

There are some very irritating things about the plays that we chose: they're incredibly old, many of them are written by dead people, and they're full of words. I am not particularly wedded to any of these things. It's just that they happen to be very great plays that you can decide to tour for a long period of time, because they give a wonderful array of parts that deal with apparently modern subjects - politics, sex, love, the supernatural. All of those things seem to be explored well at the heart of those plays that we present.

- Interview with Declan Donnellan from In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre, edited by Maria M. Delgado & Paul Heritage

Cheek by Jowl, formed in 1981 by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, has produced some of the finest works of modern world theatre. Classics are the house speciality - Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster, Restoration comedy (1660-1710) and European classics (from Sophocles to García Lorca to Racine). Its repertoire also includes contemporary material such as Angels in America and Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner, as well as rediscovered or forgotten work like Ostrovsky's A Family Affair.

One of the company's great achievements is the way it was able to dismantle British theatre's outmoded casting practices. While other companies were wondering whether, in 1980s multi-racial Britain, they could do something so radical as casting a black actor to play Othello, Cheek by Jowl put in place full integrated casting for Fuente Ovejuna at the National Theatre in 1989, leading British theatre into a new political and cultural awareness.

The company has performed in more than 300 cities in 40 countries across six continents and has received numerous international awards.

www.cheekbyjowl.com