Public Servant Lifestyle

We take a look at the most famous classical theatre company in the world; one dedicated to the world’s greatest playwright.

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford.

The RSC recently staged the biggest festival in its history, inviting theatre companies from across the world and around the UK to join the Company in a massive, unique celebration of Shakespeare’s complete works. From April 2006 the RSC began hosting The Complete Works, a year-long Festival of the entire Shakespeare canon at its Stratford-upon-Avon home. The Festival embraced film, new writing, and contemporary music, as well as a comprehensive survey of theatre artists currently interpreting Shakespeare worldwide. The Complete Works celebrated the truly global reach of arguably the greatest writer in the English language, and was the first time all 37 plays, the sonnets and the long poems had been presented at the same event.

Fifteen of the productions in The Complete Works were staged by the RSC company themselves, with the remainder performed by visiting players from the UK and abroad, including visiting companies from South and North America, Russia (Cheek by Jowl’s Russian Twelfth Night), the Middle East (including director Sulayman Al-Bassam's Pan-Arab version of Richard III focusing on Saddam Hussein’s early days), Asia (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream by a company of performers from across India and Sri Lanka), Africa (represented by The Baxter Theatre Centre) and across Europe (including Münchner Kammerspiele) to explore Shakespeare’s continuing influence on cultures around the world.

"Not Only For Shakespeare Aficionados"

RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd said: “While there will be some who’ll relish the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see all the plays in one Festival, The Complete Works is not only for Shakespeare aficionados. The Festival looks set to be the most extensive celebration of Shakespeare’s genius – at once a national knees-up for the RSC’s house playwright and a survey of the different approaches to his work from around the world. Our ambition is to stage one of the most significant cultural festivals of the year in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“With the RSC’s finances in the black, a secure deal for performing in London and a great team working to transform our Stratford home, we can now stage a programme that meets our ambitions for an outward-looking RSC that’s truly engaged with the world. We want to do much more than pay lip service to Shakespeare’s internationalism as we prepare the ground for artistic collaborations that will continue beyond the life of the Festival.”

New Festival Venues

As well as performing in existing RSC theatres, The Complete Works will expand to cover venues throughout the town. A new outdoor theatre, The Dell, is planned for the RSC’s riverside theatre gardens, hosting a fringe festival of work by amateur, school and student groups.

Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, provides the setting for a production of Henry VIII (from aandbc, directed by Greg Thompson), while Shakespeare’s Birthplace hosts a series of Shakespearean debates. The homeless people’s theatre company Cardboard Citizens will stage Timon of Athens as a management-training course in a local hotel.

In October 2006 the Company will create a new temporary 100-seat studio theatre inside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre auditorium. This new venue, created especially for one month of the festival, will host small-scale, multi-media and physical theatre companies. Visitors will include Filter, Forkbeard Fantasy and Yellow Earth in a co-production with Shanghai Arts.

The most significant new building to launch during the Festival will be the 1,000 seat Courtyard Theatre which opens in July 2006. The new, temporary theatre, built adjoining The Other Place, allows for increased audience capacity in Stratford during the Festival of up to 2,800 theatregoers a night. The Courtyard Theatre will continue as the Company’s main theatre when work starts in 2007 on the transformation of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

The Courtyard Theatre

The thrust-stage Courtyard Theatre, a prototype auditorium for the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre, opens with Artistic Director Michael Boyd re-visiting the Henry VI trilogy – plays which won him an Olivier award in 2001. The productions mark the start of a new history cycle encompassing Shakespeare’s entire chronicle of English history. Visiting companies in The Courtyard Theatre include Edward Hall’s Propeller all-male company with a residency which includes The Taming of the Shrew.

Following the success of its £5 young people’s tickets at the Albery theatre in the 2004/5 RSC London Season, the Company is extending the initiative to The Complete Works. Young people aged 16-25 will be able to buy £5 tickets, including some of the best seats available, either in advance or on the day.

New Century, New Complete Shakespeare!

The Festival year also sees the launch of a major new publishing project – a new ‘RSC edition’ of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick and a member of the RSC’s Board.

The first new edition of the Complete Works this century, the project is a partnership between the RSC and publishers Macmillan and Random House.

Editor of the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate, said: “With each new century, we see Shakespeare in new light and the process of editing him begins afresh. Understanding Shakespeare as a working dramatist whose plays were changed and adapted in the theatre has called into question some long-held assumptions about the relationship between his early printed texts.

"With the intimate involvement of RSC artists we will be able to produce a 21st century version of the only truly authoritative edition of Shakespeare: The First Folio that was published by his fellow-actors.

“The editorial approach will spare no blushes with Shakespeare’s humour. Compared with previous editions, our glossary takes a much less coy attitude to the sexual innuendo and wickedly playful language of the plays.”

New Work

The festival will highlight the vital and continuing connection between the contemporary imagination and the works of Shakespeare. Reaching across the centuries and picking up the playwriting baton are Roy Williams who has written a response to Much Ado About Nothing set against the backdrop of the Iraq War, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the starting point for a new play by Rona Munro (Survival), and Leo Butler who has taken free rein with The Tempest exploring the flickering moral compass of faith in a foreign land. All three writers were commissioned to create large scale plays with no restriction on cast size.

In addition, the RSC is continuing its collaboration with BBC Radio 3, presenting a fourth new play called Regime Change by Peter Straughan. A re-working of Julius Caesar, the play will be produced on BBC Radio 3 during the festival.

Learning & Community Projects

The Complete Works Festival will be underpinned by an extensive programme of education and community work that will run throughout the festival. The RSC will launch an inquiry – Studying Shakespeare: time for change? – re-evaluating how Shakespeare is introduced to young people in our schools and colleges through a series of events and conferences.

A report at the end of the festival year will make a series of recommendations to the Government and key policy makers on the future teaching of Shakespeare.

Highlights in the education and community programme include:

August 2006 will see the culmination of a two-year project between three partners – the RSC, Nos do Morro (a theatre school and company from the favelas of Rio de Janiero) and Birmingham City Council’s Gallery 37 project, which uses the arts to help young people at risk.

Schools across Warwickshire will present their own Complete Works Festival in The Dell outdoor theatre in an initiative supported by Warwickshire County Council.

The RSC is joining forces with five of the UK’s major drama schools to produce Young People’s Shakespeare productions. Students will all produce shortened productions of plays specifically designed for school audiences that will play in Stratford and tour to schools across the UK.

About The Company

The RSC is one of the UK's national theatre companies. In the last ten years, the Company has mounted 171 new productions, given 19,000 performances, sold 11 million tickets, and played in 100 towns and cities in the UK and 50 towns and cities around the globe. The company's turnover is £32 million.

Here's a few of the impressive facts and figures about what the RSC do, all year round:

RSC brings an estimated £31.75 million worth of investment to the Stratford/West Midlands area each year. RSC also brings an estimated £18 million worth of direct income into the Stratford area, including £11.8 million of self-generated income.

Over half over the RSC's income is self-generated, with over 850,000 visitors in 2001/2.

The RSC received £12.8 million in subsidy from the Arts Council of England in 2002/3.

The RSC performed over 40 weeks of UK touring in year 2000/1.

In 1998, the RSC launched a policy of programming for family audiences with a new stage version of C.S Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. This production alone attracted 40,000 first-time attendees to the RSC.

Over 250,000 people in the UK under the age of 25 see the RSC's work each year - approximately 25% of the RSC's total audience.

For the 2001 production of Alice in Wonderland, the Hats, Millinery and Jewellery Department alone made over 90 items of hats and accessories, including fans and jewellery.

The Snow Queen in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2002) wore a hat with stripped ostrich quills. Each quill had to be hologrammed and painted.

The RSC Men’s Costume Department can make a shirt from start to finish in four hours. A good pair of trousers might take twelve hours.

The RSC Armoury uses the local blacksmith to make battle shields in his forge. Abattoir aprons, made of fine steel mesh, are used by the RSC Armoury to make chain mail for battle wear.

All RSC hats, boots and costumes make their way to the RSC Hire Wardrobe after the end of a production and are available to be hired by members of the public.

The Director of The Complete Works is Deborah Shaw who joined the RSC in 2004 from the Bath Shakespeare Festival. Deborah was previously Artistic Director of the Chester Gateway Theatre and Associate Director at Watford Palace Theatre.

The new RSC Complete Works volume - the first edition to be published based on the First Folio since 1709, will be launched during the festival year. Individual editions of the plays will follow from 2007.

Follow this link to visit the RSC’s special Complete Works Festival website.

More information available in Books, Arts & Culture, On Stage, United Kingdom