The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs more than 1,000 staff and opens around 20 productions a year. The RSC plays regularly in London, Stratford-upon-Avon, and on tours across the UK and internationally.
The company's home is in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it has redeveloped its Royal Shakespeare and Swan theatres as part of a £112.8-million "Transformation" project. The theatres re-opened in November 2010, having closed in 2007.
As well as the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the RSC produces new work from living artists.
Contents
Company history
The early years
There have been theatrical performances in Stratford-upon-Avon since at least Shakespeare's day, though the first recorded performance of a play written by Shakespeare himself was in 1746 when Parson Joseph Greene, master of Stratford Grammar School, organised a charitable production to fund the restoration of Shakespeare's funerary monument. John Ward's Birmingham-based company, the Warwickshire Company of Comedians, agreed to perform it. A surviving copy of the playbill records that the company performed Othello. The first building erected to commemorate Shakespeare was David Garrick's Jubilee Pavilion in 1769, and there have been at least 17 buildings used to perform Shakespeare's plays since.
The first permanent commemorative building to Shakespeare's works in the town was a theatre built in 1827, in the gardens of New Place, but has long since been demolished. The RSC's history began with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was the brainchild of a local brewer, Charles Edward Flower. He donated a 2-acre (0.81 ha) site by the River Avon and in 1875 launched an international campaign to build a theatre in the town of Shakespeare's birth. The theatre, a Victorian-Gothic building seating just over 700 people, opened on 23 April 1879, with a performance of Much Ado About Nothing, a title which gave ammunition to several critics.
The Memorial, a red-brick Gothic cathedral, designed by Dodgshun and Unsworth of Westminster, was unkindly described by Bernard Shaw as "an admirable building, adaptable to every purpose except that of a theatre." From 1919, under the direction of William Bridges-Adams and after a slow start, its resident New Shakespeare Company became one of the most prestigious in Britain. The theatre received a royal charter of Incorporation in 1925, which gave it status.
On the afternoon of 6 March 1926, when a new season was about to commence rehearsals, smoke was seen. Fire broke out, and the mass of half-timbering chosen to ornament the interior provided dry tinder. By the following morning the theatre was a blackened shell. The company transferred its Shakespeare festivals to a converted local cinema. Fund-raising began for the rebuilding of the theatre, with generous donations arriving from philanthropists in America.
In January 1928, following an open competition, 29-year-old Elisabeth Scott was unanimously appointed architect for the new theatre which became the first important work erected in the United Kingdom from the designs of a female architect. George Bernard Shaw commented that her design was the only one that showed any theatre sense. Her modernist plans for an art deco structure came under fire from many directions but the new building was opened triumphantly on William Shakespeare's birthday, 23 April 1932. Later it came under the direction of Sir Barry Jackson in 1945, Anthony Quayle from 1948 to 1956 and Glen Byam Shaw 1957–1959, with an impressive roll-call of actors. Scott's building, with some minor adjustments to the stage, remained in constant use until 2007 when it was closed for a major refit of the interior.
Timeline
1932 – New Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opens, abutting the remains of the old.
1961 – Chartered name of the corporation and the Stratford theatre becomes "Royal Shakespeare".
1974 – The Other Place opened, created from a prefabricated former store/rehearsal room in Stratford.
1986 – The Swan Theatre opened, created from the shell of the 1879 Memorial Theatre.
1991 – Purpose-built new Other Place, designed by Michael Reardon, opens.
September 2004 – The vision for the renewal of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre transformation is announced.
July 2006 – The Courtyard Theatre opens with a staging of Michael Boyd's Histories.
November 2010 – The Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres re-open following their transformation.
March 2016 – The Other Place was reinstated as a 200-seat studio theatre.
The RSC
In 1959, while still the director-designate of the Memorial Theatre, Peter Hall announced that the formation of a permanent company would be a primary objective. David Addenbrooke wrote of Hall's belief that Shakespeare, more than any other dramatist, needed a "style", a tradition and unity of direction and acting. On 14 January 1960, Hall's first policy statement as director also proposed the acquisition of a second theatre, in London, to be used as a city outlet for selected Stratford productions. The RSC was formally established on 20 March 1961 with the royal announcement that the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre would henceforth be known as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the company as the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The critic Michael Billington, summarising these events, wrote: "In 1960 the twenty-nine-year-old Peter Hall formally took charge at Stratford-upon-Avon and set about turning a star-laden, six-month Shakespeare festival into a monumental, year-round operation built around a permanent company, a London base and contemporary work from home and abroad. Looking back, it is difficult to realise just how radical Hall's dream was at the time; or indeed how much opposition there was to the creation of what became officially known in March 1961 as the Royal Shakespeare Company."
John Barton had been appointed associate director in January 1960, and was followed in 1962 by Michel Saint-Denis, Peter Brook and Clifford Williams who joined the company as resident directors. John Bury was appointed head of design in 1964. The repertoire was also widened to take in modern work and classics other than Shakespeare.
In 1962, strong opposition to the establishment of a London base for the RSC came from the Royal National Theatre which – led by Viscount Chandos and Laurence Olivier – wished to be the sole subsidised company operating in London. Following a deal with Prince Littler, managing director of Associated Theatre Properties, the RSC established the Aldwych Theatre as its London base for productions transferred from Stratford to London, its stage redesigned to match the RST's apron stage.
Twenty years later, in the summer of 1982, the company took up London residence in both the Barbican Theatre and The Pit studio space in the Barbican Centre under the auspices of the City of London. The RSC was closely involved in the design of these two venues. In 2002 it left the Barbican after a series of allegedly poor seasons, partly because the then artistic director Adrian Noble wanted to develop the company's touring performances. His decision means the company has no regular London home.
Artistic directors
Peter Hall (1960–1968)
Trevor Nunn (1968–1978)
Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands (1978–1986)
Terry Hands (1986–1991)
Adrian Noble (1991–2003)
Michael Boyd (2003–2012)
Gregory Doran (2012–2022)
Erica Whyman (2021–2023) (Acting Artistic Director)
Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey (2023– )
Theatres
The RSC has three permanent theatres in Stratford-upon-Avon:
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, a 1,060-seat theatre with thrust stage (re-opened 24 November 2010 after Transformation project)
The Swan Theatre, a smaller thrust stage, capacity 469
The Other Place, a studio theatre, rehearsal room and development space that opened in April 2016
The Courtyard Theatre was built as a temporary replacement for The Other Place theatre to house the company's work when the RST and Swan were closed for the Transformation project. It provided a full-scale working prototype for the new RST's auditorium, seating 1,045 people around a thrust stage. It was also used in 2012 for productions in the World Shakespeare Festival including Much Ado About Nothing in an Indian setting. The Courtyard Theatre was replaced by The Other Place, which was reinstated as a 200-seat studio theatre in 2016. In July 2021, a temporary 500-seat outdoor theatre was built in the Swan Gardens named the Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Garden Theatre. The theatre was built due to the COVID-19 pandemic to allow productions to return following the Government guidance, beginning with Phillip Breen's production of The Comedy of Errors running during summer 2021. The theatre was resurrected and renamed as The Holloway Garden Theatre for the summer 2024 production of As You Like It, directed by Brendan O'Hea.
The company's London presence has included tenancies of the Aldwych Theatre, The Place in Duke's Road, Euston, the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, the Barbican Theatre and The Pit at the Barbican Centre in the City of London. There have also been seasons at The Mermaid Theatre, the Almeida Theatre (1988 and 1989), the Roundhouse in Camden, the Young Vic, the Playhouse Theatre, the Novello Theatre and the Gielgud Theatre.
The Theatre Royal in Newcastle upon Tyne is the third home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, alongside Stratford-upon-Avon and London.