Part of a Knowledge Exchange Programme with the Pegasus Theatre and others within Oxford, Storming Utopia has been engaging a range of people in discussions about ideal communities, and the relation between Thomas More’s Utopia, first published 500 years ago, Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Oxford, today. The central questions that have been asked are: who owns, runs, or governs the city we live in? how do you get in, and how do you leave? Do the various parts of Oxford – schools, mosques, churches, rivers, playgrounds, shopping centres, colleges… and theatres – make of our city a Utopia, or just a collection of islands? These are ancient questions, but they all still matter today.
