Join the BSS Mailing List...

or support the BSS by
becoming a BSS member...

The Society’s beginnings were simple. In 1975 its founders hired a 30-seat theatre behind a bar, the Theatre Ile St. Louis, just off the Grand’Place. Here they began performing devised entertainments on a theme from Shakespeare, which were essentially rehearsed readings, gradually gaining confidence and moving to a bigger theatre for a full-scale production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well in December 1976.

In the summer of 1976 the Society staged its first ‘al fresco’ performance with shortened versions of two Shakespeare Comedies in the garden of the Jones family in Lasne, and within two years had staged its first ‘chateau’ production, The Merchant of Venice, at Ecaussines-Lalaing. Such summer open-air performances in some of Belgium’s most beautiful castles quickly became a hallmark of the Society. The weather of recent summers, however, has not been kind to us, so such performances are now an occasional rather than an annual event.

In its 44-year history the Society has staged most of Shakespeare’s canon. It has also ventured into Greek Tragedy, Restoration Comedy, other Elizabethan dramatists such as Middleton and German dramatists such as Schiller, as well as modern works by Beckett, Fry, Goldman, Lorca and Stoppard. It also organizes workshops on acting and stagecraft run by prominent names in British Theatre including Andrew Visnevski, theatre director and teacher of drama at RADA.

If you would like to become involved in what the BSS does, either backstage or onstage please contact us at:

this e-mail address.