Bridgerton actor and one-time Brixton resident Adjoa Andoh held her audience spellbound as she read extracts she had chosen from a precious Shakespeare “folio” at the opening event of the 2025 Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival.
The festival, which runs into July, offers a range of events from a zine fair to Remembering the Windrush Generation.
Introducing Adjoa Andoh, Jon Newman, manager of Lambeth Archives on Brixton Hill, which hosted the event, explained both the reason Lambeth owns valuable Shakespeare folios, and the playwright’s connections with the borough.
The folios were put together from the many separate parts of the scripts of Shakespeare’s plays after his death by supporters who recognised his genius.
Lambeth’s were donated to the borough’s libraries by the by the wealthy Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence in the early 20th century. Ironically, his life’s work was attempting to prove that an uneducated provincial nobody like Shakespeare could not possibly have written his plays.
Newman also explained how Lambeth’s many small theatres in the nineteenth century could not afford to stage entire Shakespeare plays, so presented extracts – that might be performed on horseback – interspersed with dance and musical turns and more … leading the way to variety and music hall.
“Shakespeare writes on a heartbeat,” Adjoa Andoh told her audience. That told her he understood both that human beings are built for communion, and also that he was a showman.
“He wrote variety. He’d start with a song. There’d be gags. There’d by the comedy trio. There’d be the tragedy. There’d be the, ‘Oh my God. What’s gonna happen next?’,” she said.
“The humanity of him is what keeps me loving him.
“Anyone who’s ever been in love. Anyone who’s ever fallen out with their parents. Anyone who’s ever run away. Anyone who’s ever been disregarded because of their gender or their race.
“All the stories of who we are as human beings are in there – anyone, whoever. Shakespeare has all our stories in here,” she said, holding up the folio she was about to read from.
