Perry Mills and his boys are fast becoming the stuff of legend. A cut above your average drama society, Edward’s Boys are currently ploughing their way through the dramatic canon of the early modern childrens’ companies… we were given a consummately professional and finely-realised production of a very rarely-performed play. It’ll be fascinating to see where the boys take us next.

They are our modern day “Little Eyases” as the companies of boy performers were referred to in Hamlet. But in fact the exercise is much more than that, and should I think be seen, as it deserves to be, in the wider context of Shakespeare study and performance worldwide…for me as a Shakespeare director, with particular interest in the repertoire of these contemporaries, these productions have proved invaluable… Forgive me for going on at length, but I think the school is producing something rather miraculous, and I suspect it is too easy for that to go unsaid. So I am saying it.

The boys handled Lyly’s language with ease and panache. This is the first time I have seen Lyly performed by actors who are not distracted by their characters’ tendency for wordplay… Edward’s Boys delighted in the language their characters delighted in, allowing the wordplay to lead them as they spoke.

“They bear the mark of a great early modern acting company: not only can they enliven seemingly impenetrable prose, maximise the multi-media possibilities of performance, take liberties with text and create fluidity and dynamism in clowning and comedy, but they can take and adapt those qualities as occasion, space and audience require.”

Anyone interested in early modern theatre should see an Edward’s Boys’ production. Their exploration of the repertory written for the Boys’ Companies may not be for the faint-hearted. The closed-minded will side with the anti-theatrical pamphleteers and declare that disguise is indeed a wickedness. The open-hearted will relish their performances as a revelation.

Your work is the most sustained attempt to re-imagine what we think boy companies could do – and it will really rewrite the academic theatre history books.

Edward’s Boys are a revelation. Anyone who is interested in early modern plays in performance ought to see them. In terms of physicality, proxemics and embodiment, they open up new theatrical horizons for even the most experienced twenty first century theatre goer; they challenge complacency about theatrical norms; they are also extremely entertaining.

Edward’s Boys’ revivals of plays by the likes of Lyly, Middleton and Marston have informed and transformed my thinking about early modern drama and children’s company plays in particular. No modern revivals can give us concrete answers to our questions about the plays or their performance style, but over the last few years Perry MIlls’ lucid and imaginative productions have asked the very best kinds of questions.

Edward’s Boys must be the bravest company in the world of early modern theatre. They fearlessly take on dramatists who have been ignored by other theatre companies, demonstrating how much early modern creativity and excitement we all overlook. Their work is a peculiar fusion of scholarly breakthrough and theatrical joy: miss them if you dare!

Edward’s Boys are a firm fixture on the map of the English theatrical scene—and they have also changed the map of how we think about early modern theatre (not just boys’ company plays).  The boys – of all ages – are simultaneously innocent and knowing in performance, keeping city comedy teetering on the brink of send-up and making revenge tragedy able to confront its own excess.