A theatre performance that was due to take place in a historic former prison that once held Oscar Wilde has been moved to a different venue.

Rabble theatre company was due to put an event showcasing behind the scenes of William the Conqueror at Reading Gaol, which has been empty for 11 years.

Artistic director Toby Davies said the company could not justify the costs involved with making the prison safe and accessible just for a one day event.

The BBC has approached the Ziran Education Foundation, which owns the prison, for comment.

The prison formally closed in January 2014 and was bought by the Foundation for £7m last year.

Foundation founder Channing Bi said in October he hoped to turn the site into a hotel, museum and art gallery.

Mr Davies, who has previously campaigned for the jail to be saved for artistic purposes, said the change of venue for the show was "frustrating".

"But you just get to a point where the challenges and the costs that we would have to pass onto our audience are so outrageous that it's just quite a simple straightforward decision," he said,

"We can't justify this for a one day event.

"If we were there for longer it would be different, but not this time."

He added that the new venue, St Laurence's Church, was "amazing".

"[It] was founded in 1121 and we're doing a play about William the Conqueror, so the history is amazing there," he said.

Mr Bi said previously his plans for the site did not include building flats, and a portrait by celebrated street artist Banksy, that appeared on the prison wall in 2021, would "of course" stay.

In January, an augmented-reality exhibition allowed members of the public to view artwork hung on the walls via a smartphone app, without entering the building.

Oscar Wilde spent two years at the prison after being convicted in 1895 of gross indecency – effectively for being gay.

He spent the last three years of his life in exile in France, where he composed his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, describing an execution at the prison.

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Two men have been sentenced for their role in the deaths of a family from India who froze during a blizzard while trying to cross into the US from Canada.

Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel and Steve Anthony Shand were convicted last November of human trafficking, criminal conspiracy and culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

In court in the US state of Minnesota, Patel was sentenced to just over 10 years in prison. Shand was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison. The custodial terms were about half of what prosecutors had sought.

The bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife Vaishaliben, 37, and their two children, 11-year-old Vihangi and three-year-old Dharmik, were found in January 2022.

Authorities said the couple, both schoolteachers, and their children were trying to cross into the US when they were caught in a blizzard, with temperatures as low as -38C (-36F).

The family had travelled from their home village in the western Indian state of Gujarat to Toronto.

Prosecutors said the Patels became separated from a larger group of people who were being smuggled.

The family was found in a field in the province of Manitoba by Canadian authorities, just 12m (39ft) from the US border.

Investigators said the group had been walking for hours in the freezing cold and were discovered after Shand was stopped by police on the US side of the border.

Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, an Indian national, was not related to the family.

Prosecutors said he was a human trafficker known as "Dirty Harry" and oversaw a large-scale operation that brought other Indian nationals to Canada on student visas, then smuggled them south.

Shand, a US citizen from Florida, was set to pick up the migrants after they crossed the border before driving them to Chicago.

At the trial in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, US prosecutor Michael McBride argued that while members of the Patel family were "slowly dying in the freezing cold, Steve Shand sat in his warm van" on the Minnesota side.

"Harshkumar Patel texted from sunny Florida and did nothing to help," Mr McBride said.

"For weeks, they knew the cold would kill, but they decided their profit was more important than these human lives," he told the court.

Among the trial witnesses was Rajinder Pal Singh, a convicted human smuggler who helped move people across the border between British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province, and the north-western US state of Washington.

Acting US Attorney Lisa Kirkpatrick said in a statement after the sentencing: "Every time I think about this case I think about this family – including two beautiful little children – who the defendants left to freeze to death in a blizzard.

"As we've seen time and time again, human traffickers care nothing for humanity."

In 2022, neighbours from the Patels' home village told the BBC that it was common for families in the area to attempt to move to North America in pursuit of better economic opportunities.