The mystery of Shakespeare’s missing skull

Ben, who lives in Peasmarsh, said: “I had just written an adaptation of A Christmas Carol and I was looking for a new play to write and I wanted to go back to doing a two-hander. There was a particular interaction on the stage when we were doing A Christmas Carol and I just think there's something so special about two actors working together.

"So I started looking for another thread and I started researching about Shakespeare and his history, the fact that he was an unknown quantity to some extent, who he was and did he actually write the plays.

“And then in 2016 there was a Channel 4 documentary and they were scanning his grave in Stratford upon Avon and they discovered something really remarkable, that his skull was missing.

"People were not at all sure why that was the case but there was some rumour that 300 years before there had been a grave robbing and that the skull had been taken then. And to add to the strangeness, given that Shakespeare was pretty wealthy, they were expecting to find the tomb deep inside the church and his family buried next to him but in fact he was buried only two feet deep and wrapped in a shroud and not a coffin... and he was missing his head.

“And that started me thinking. Who is Shakespeare?

"And if he had no head, is it still Shakespeare in his grave?

"I did some more digging and discovered that there were some very strange things that happened.

“My play travels through time. We go back to the First World War and then we go back in time to other places, two of them in the 18th century and another one on the day that Shakespeare died which was in 1616.

"I try to answer some of the questions and also to look at Shakespeare and his history. Shakespeare never appears in the play but it's what happens around him and around his grave.

"I would say that it's a comedy drama really. There is a lot of fun in it and a lot of ridiculousness but at the same time there is a discussion of the facts and some of the things that people never knew about Shakespeare.

“We have two actors in the show, Peter Miller who was in my last play Whiskey and Soda and Kate Harbour who I worked with on Bob the Builder.

"She did the voices for many of the characters in the show.

"She has done many other characters in many other shows, for example on Aardman Animation's Shaun the Sheep, Doctor Who and The Octonauts to name a few.”

And the piece works as a two-hander: “It is quite poetic and also you can really focus on these two characters but they play different characters. They interchange.”