Illyria Comes North: HER Productions Takes Twelfth Night On The Road

There are few Shakespeare plays more comfortable with confusion than Twelfth Night. Shipwrecks. Separated twins. False names. Bad love. Worse poetry. A servant in yellow stockings. People falling in love with the wrong person for the right reasons, and the right person for reasons they do not yet understand.

In other words: ideal territory for HER Productions.

This summer, the Manchester-based company returns with its annual Unseemly Shakespeare production, taking on the Bard’s great romantic comedy with an all-female and non-binary cast - and with three familiar faces from Coronation Street stepping into key roles.

Opening at The Dukes in Lancaster from 19–21 June, the production then travels to Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester from 24 June–5 July, before heading to Rochdale Heywood Civic on 9–10 July and Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield on 14–15 July. Hope Mill Theatre lists the production as HER’s 2026 return with Twelfth Night, co-directed by Kayleigh Hawkins and Stuart Crowther.

The route is the thing. This is not Shakespeare being helicoptered into the North for one prestige date and a few photographs. It is a compact northern tour moving through Lancaster, Manchester, Rochdale and Huddersfield - places with distinct audiences, different cultural ecologies, and a shared need for ambitious theatre that does not require a train to London and a second mortgage.

HER’s Unseemly Shakespeare has, since 2017, built its identity around reimagining Shakespeare through female-led, all-female and non-binary casts. The company describes the strand as work that is “Unseemly by name and unseemly by nature” - a useful phrase, because it gets to the heart of what makes these productions interesting. They are not reverent acts of preservation. They are acts of occupation.

In Twelfth Night, that approach is particularly alive. This is already a play obsessed with gender, performance, disguise and desire. Viola, believing her twin brother lost after a shipwreck, washes ashore in Illyria and disguises herself as Cesario. She enters the service of Count Orsino, who is in love with Olivia. Olivia, naturally, falls for Cesario. Viola, less conveniently, falls for Orsino. Everyone is performing something. Everyone is hiding something. And love, being Shakespearean love, behaves with almost no regard for administrative clarity.

Taking the central role of Viola is Hannah Ellis-Ryan, whose recent work includes HER’s Private Lives, James Graham’s The Angry Brigade, Mike Bartlett’s Cock, Othello, A Doll’s House with Elysium Theatre Company, and more than 30 episodes of Coronation Street as Hannah Gilmore, daughter of Liz and Jim McDonald. Ellis-Ryan is also a writer and producer; her short film Filter, which she wrote and starred in, won Best Short at the British International Film Festival, and in 2025 she received the Olwyn Wymark Award from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain for her work in new writing.

Channique Sterling Brown, best known to many audiences as Dee Dee Bailey in Coronation Street, plays Feste. Sterling Brown won Best Newcomer at the 2023 British Soap Awards for the role, and her casting here is especially intriguing. Feste is the play’s licensed truth-teller: clown, singer, observer, disruptor. In a world full of romantic self-delusion, Feste is often the one who sees most clearly.

Beth Vyse takes on Sir Toby. Vyse has also appeared in Weatherfield, playing Bridget in Coronation Street, and is known for her role as Sister Levi in Channel 4’s Everyone Else Burns. Sir Toby is usually treated as a swaggering male chaos engine - drunk, manipulative, funny until he isn’t. Placing that role in this casting frame opens up the possibility of something more slippery and more interesting than simple comic bluster.

They are joined by Lucie Browne as Sebastian, Kassie Jay Ellis as Sir Andrew, Jessica Mannion as Olivia, Angela Heenan as Orsino, Sophie Ellicott as Antonio, Frankie Gold as Malvolio, Maya Dhokia as Maria and Beth Sime as Valentine.

That ensemble is important because Twelfth Night is not simply a love story. It is a play about a whole society losing its shape. Illyria is a place of mourning, appetite, idleness, longing and misrule. Olivia refuses the world because she is grieving. Orsino luxuriates in the idea of love rather than the person in front of him. Malvolio believes dignity can be weaponised into advancement. Sir Toby and his circle turn mockery into sport. Viola, the outsider, survives by becoming someone else.

It is very funny. It is also, underneath the music and mistaken identity, a little brutal.

That combination - comedy with teeth - is where HER Productions has often found its power. The company’s previous Unseemly Shakespeare work has not approached the canon as something fixed and untouchable, but as material that can be reopened. Hope Mill notes that HER’s 2024 Taming of the Shrew was listed in The Stage’s Top 50 Shows of the Year and is due to transfer to London in 2026 - a reminder that this annual northern Shakespeare tradition is increasingly part of a wider national conversation.

There is a wider point here about access, too. Shakespeare is still too often treated as cultural furniture: impressive, heavy, inherited, and not always particularly inviting. But the plays survive because they can be argued with. A production like this does not ask audiences to admire Shakespeare from a safe distance. It asks what happens when contemporary performers, northern venues, queer-coded questions of identity and a company rooted in female and non-binary talent all collide with a 400-year-old text that was already full of disguise.

And yes, the casting of Coronation Street favourites will help bring audiences in. That should not be sniffed at. Soap actors are among the most technically agile performers in British popular culture: fast, emotionally precise, and used to making heightened situations land in living rooms without losing their humanity. If their presence helps someone take a chance on Shakespeare who might not otherwise have done so, that is not a compromise. That is theatre doing its job.

What HER Productions appears to understand is that Shakespeare does not need protecting from the present. He needs producing by people with something at stake.

Twelfth Night has always known that identity is unstable, love is ridiculous, grief makes fools of us, and performance can be both survival strategy and trap. In the hands of an all-female and non-binary company, touring through northern venues, those themes do not have to be artificially “updated”. They are already there, waiting to be claimed.

So, Illyria comes North this summer. Expect shipwrecks, songs, bad decisions, good jokes, gender trouble, yellow stockings, and the kind of romantic chaos that only works when everyone on stage knows exactly what they are doing.

Shakespeare, then. But less museum. More mischief.

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All images: Emma Ledwith