What’s on
Join us for talks, play readings, open days, costume demonstrations, guided walks, and more…
Some events are online, some take place on the site of The Rose Playhouse itself.
We are yet to open on a daily basis, but will do so just as soon as we can.
Just by buying a ticket you are helping to support our mission, so please do come along!
On next:
ONLINE TALK
Monday 13 April 2026
6.30pm (BST) online
IN CONVERSATION: JESSE BERGER
Founder & Artistic Director of Red Bull Theater
Join acclaimed American theatre-maker Jesse Berger, Founder and Artistic Director of New York’s Red Bull Theater, in conversation with fellow director Ben Prusiner from The Rose Playhouse, sharing his experiences and insights into producing classical theatre for modern audiences – including his current production of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which has just extended its run until the 3rd of May having received rave reviews and a Lortel award nomination for outstanding revival.
RED BULL THEATER was founded in New York in 2003, and is named after the rowdy Jacobean playhouse that opened in 1605 in Clerkenwell, on the northern edge of the City of London. Taking the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as their cornerstone, Red Bull Theater’s mission is to bring rarely seen classic plays to dynamic new life for modern audiences, and the company also produces new works that are in conversation with the classics. The company’s unique programming has seen it receive Lortel, Drama Desk, Drama League, Calloway, Off Broadway Alliance, and Obie nominations and awards.
JESSE BERGER has also directed productions of Pericles, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, The Duchess of Malfi, The Witch of Edmonton, Volpone, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Changeling, The Maids, Loot, and The Government Inspector for the company. He has also directed elsewhere in New York and across the country, and has taught and directed at numerous institutions, including the Juilliard School of Drama, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia University.
“The most exciting theater in New York”
– Time Out
Tickets:
£8 / £5 students & Friends
NOTE: A catch-up link will be made available upon request to anyone who buys a ticket for the talk but who can’t attend live on the day.
ONLINE TALK
Monday 27 April 2026
6.30pm online
BALLADS AS THEATRE ‘MERCH’ IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON
Professor Tiffany Stern
Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Why were theatrical broadsheet ballads sold outside The Rose and other playhouses? Who wrote them, printed them, and sung them? And why and how were they connected with the plays performed inside?
Playwrights often started out as song-writers, and regularly product-placed ballads within their dramas. Acting as both advertisements and souvenirs, ballads constituted a crucial – though now largely forgotten – form of theatrical merchandise and musical paratext.
Join Professor Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute as she introduces the ballad merchants – or ‘balladmongers’ – who sung and sold ballads, and the printers who published them, and provides examples of ballads to be found in plays by Ben Jonson, sung after plays as jigs or ‘themes’ by clowns, and performed as summaries for the plays of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.
Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, having previously been Professor of Early Modern Drama at Oxford University. She is general editor of Arden Shakespeare: Fourth Series, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Her new book, Ballad Business: Selling Early Modern Theatre, was published by Cambridge University Press in February this year.
PRESENTED IN CONJUNCTION WITH LITERATURE WORKS AND THE PAGE OF PLYMOUTH PROJECT
Literature Works is a charity and an Arts Council England National Portfolio organisation in Southwest England. Its Page of Plymouth project is centred on the lost play by Ben Jonson & Thomas Dekker (performed at The Rose in 1599), and explores stories about gender, justice and ordinary lives in Plymouth both then and now.
Tickets:
£8 / £5 students & Friends
NOTE: A catch-up link will be made available upon request to anyone who buys a ticket for the talk but who can’t attend live on the day.
Coming to an event onsite at The Rose?
For information about your visit:
You can download our FREE DIGITAL GUIDE to use during your visit, or to explore The Rose virtually anytime, anywhere.
The Rose Sonic Trail: A Playgoer’s Journey
Step into the shoes of an Elizabethan playgoer with this immersive 75 minute audio walk that begins and ends at The Rose.
It is 1594, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is playing at The Rose. Explore the local area with one of the actors, Jonathan Singer, as your guide, and encounter the stories, sounds, and characters of Philip Henslowe’s London.
You may be surprised by what you hear!
