Paul Prescott concluded the last survey of Shakespeare productions outside London with mention of his favourite production of 2019, a Hamlet in Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. His injunction to remember that there is ‘a world elsewhere’ feels ever more timely in a year that has seen the UK government neglecting (or forgetting) Northern Ireland as it negotiates trade deals, and whose devolved policies on COVID-19 restrictions have made border crossings within mainland Britain an unusually fraught process. In inheriting this column – with its remit to cover productions in England outside London – the question of borders that separate Theatr Clwyd from Liverpool Everyman (my two local theatres growing up) or Watford Palace from the Globe (at what point is one outside London?) feels part and parcel of an England that too often forgets it is not, in John of Gaunt’s words, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’.