< Continued from page 1

From Shakespeare to Peter Pan (and Potter)

The Ceremony began with a scene of Britain’s ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ and the ringing of the world’s largest harmonically tuned bell by gold medal winning Olympic medal winner Bradley Wiggins, and a reading from Caliban’s speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest was spoken by the character of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Britain’s most revered engineer, played by award-winning British actor Kenneth Branagh.


The set was spectacularly changed by a cast of more than 2,500 volunteers to represent the period of Industrial Revolution, and which included a spectacular simulation of the forging of the Olympic rings. The Ceremony also celebrated Britain’s free health service, the National Health Service (NHS), in a sequence that also included a celebration of Britain’s place as a leader in children’s literature, with a passage from JM Barrie’s classic Peter Pan read by author JK Rowling, with references to universally popular characters born in British fiction including Mary Poppins, Captain Hook, Voldemort and Cruella de Vil.

The Ceremony also paid tribute to Britain’s contribution to a modern revolution – the internet revolution. A sequence that featured British music from the 60’s to now, culminated in the appearance of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the worldwide web and ensured it was placed in trust and protected against ownership so it could be free for the world.

The Opening Ceremony by the Numbers

Using new pixel technology to create a light show within the stadium audience never seen before, as well as aerial choreography and 12,956 props (over 100 times more than a West End musical), the London 2012 Ceremonies Team transformed the Olympic Stadium into a series of historic, contemporary and modern settings that reflected the cultural changes and revolutions of British society.

The London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony featured a volunteer cast of more than 7,500 volunteer performers who gave up their weekends and evenings to take part in a total of 248 rehearsals at two east London rehearsal sites and at the Stadium. On average, adult volunteer performers rehearsed for 150 hours each. The child volunteers were drawn from 25 schools in the six east London Host Boroughs and the 170 16-18 year olds, from six colleges in the Host Boroughs speak more than 50 languages between them.

Following the declaration of the opening of the Games by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the spectacular finale of the Ceremony saw the Olympic Cauldron, formed of more than 200 copper petals representing the competing nations coming together in London for the Olympic Games, and ignited by seven young Torchbearers.

The “flower cauldron” involved technical and mechanical challenges in which everything had to function with perfection for the cauldron moment to shine, and the images of the chrysanthemum-like metallic petals slowly coming together to form a single honeycombed cauldron will undoubtedly be one of the best-remembered moments of the London 2012 Games.