Icon Theatre is delighted to announce that its acclaimed community theatre production Ghost Ships has been awarded Highly Commended in the Community Engagement Programme of the Year category at the prestigious 2025 Museum + Heritage Awards.
This honour builds on the project’s growing recognition, which also includes:
- Winner of the Diversity Award from the Medway African and Caribbean Association
- Shortlisted for The Stage’s Community Award, recognising excellence in socially engaged performance
The award commended the project’s deep community involvement, diversity, creative ambition, and transformative impact on participants and audiences alike. Artistic Director Nancy Hirst and Executive Director Daniel King attended the awards ceremony in London to accept the commendation, joined by representatives from The Historic Dockyard Chatham.
Nancy Hirst, Artistic Director of Icon Theatre and Director of Ghost Ships, commented:
“We’re thrilled that Ghost Ships has been recognised by the Museum and Heritage Awards. The production was created with, by and for our community, and it’s their stories, talent and spirit that brought it to life. This commendation belongs to them. We are deeply grateful to our partners at the Dockyard, to our collaborators ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company and Amina Khayyam Dance Company, and to everyone who took part.”
Ghost Ships was a major community engagement programme culminating in a large-scale theatrical production. Inspired by oral histories collected from members of Medway African and Caribbean Association and the Sahara Foundation, who worked at Chatham Dockyard around the time of its closure in 1984, Ghost Ships aimed to re-chart the Dockyard’s 400-year history by asking: Who owns our history, and what stories should we tell? The project examined the Dockyard’s impact, surfacing its rarely heard history, from its involvement in slavery and abolition to the loss and legacy of its 1984 closure.
Co-created with the communities of Chatham, Ghost Ships featured a company of 200 participants, including young people, local residents and professionals performing together live on stage.
Ghost Ships follows a long line of critically acclaimed community theatre productions from Icon Theatre including The Ballad of St John’s Car Park (2022), If Not Now (2022), and The Chatham Witch (2018). The project reinforces Icon’s commitment to inclusive, artistically ambitious work rooted in the voices and stories of local people.
Ghost Ships was an Icon Theatre, ZooNation: The Kate Prince Company and Amina Khayyam Dance Company Co-Production, supported The Historic Dockyard Chatham.
Find out more about Ghost Ships here.
For further information:
Daniel King
Executive Director, Icon Theatre
daniel@icontheatre.org.uk
