Dench’s Rose Becomes Northern Bard Centre???

Dame Judi Dench became so enamoured with the replica Rose Theatre built for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, for which she won an Oscar for her eight-minute performance as Queen Elizabeth, that the film producers gifted it to her.

Now after more than a decade in storage, Dench is donating the oak timbered- set to touring troupe, the British Shakespeare Company, with the hope of reconstructing it and establishing a permanent Shakespeare theatre in the north of England, possibly near York where Dench was born.

The BSC is now making applications about possible sites to York council as well as Manchester and Sheffield councils, in search of an appropriate site, and setting up a charitable trust to raise the necessary funds and manage the project.

Speaking about locating the replica Rose in the north rather than somewhere nearer the original 16th-century Rose on London’s Bankside, BSC founder Robert Williamson told the Observer newspaper: “The north is the place to have the Rose. London has got the Globe, it’s got Regent’s Park, it’s got the wonderful season by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the Midlands, they have got a fantastic series of theatres with the RSC doing some incredible work. But in the north of England, there isn’t anything serving as a centre for Shakespeare, or even a constant series of his plays taking place.”