RSC Launches Year-long Complete Works FestivalDate: 11 July 2005
The Royal Shakespeare Company today announced details for its promised year-long festival celebrating its “house playwright” in the town of his birth, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Complete Works, running from April 2006 to April 2007, will involve more than 30 professional companies from around the globe who, between them, will cover all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays plus his collection of sonnets and longer poems.
The Complete Works marks the first time that the bard’s complete canon has ever been presented at one event as well as the biggest project ever undertaken by the RSC. The company is dipping into its reserves to cover the additional £3.6 million cost of the event, which it expects will attract an extra 100,000 annual visitors to Stratford where 500,000 already attend RSC productions each year.
Diverse companies, returning stars
Four RSC ensemble companies will stage 15 plays, featuring some of the brightest stars from the company’s history, including (See also Today's Other News): Patrick Stewart (returning to the RSC for the first time since 1982) in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra (the latter with Harriet Walter), Judi Dench in a new musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Janet Suzman in Coriolanus, and Ian McKellen (returning for the first time since 1989) as King Lear. As part of the RSC's own programming, artistic director Michael Boyd will also revisit the Henry VI trilogy (which won him an Olivier Award in 2001) as part of a brand new history plays cycle.
At least a third of the visiting companies for the festival hail from abroad, from North and South America, Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and across continental Europe. Amongst the many foreign highlights are: the South African Baxter Theatre Centre production of Hamlet starring John Kani and directed by Janet Suzman; German director Peter Stein directing a British-cast Troilus and Cressida; the UK premiere of Yukio Ninagawa’s Japanese Titus Andronicus; Belgian director Luk Perceval’s Munchner Kammerspeile’s Othello; Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Iraqi Richard III, fashioned around the Ba’athist rise of Saddam Hussein; Cheek by Jowl’s Russian Twelfth Night; a Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Tim Supple directs a Indian and Sri Lankan cast; and American productions of Henry IV (from the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre), Love’s Labour’s Lost (from Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre) and The Merchant of Venice (from New York’s Theatre for a New Audience) featuring F Murray Abraham as Shylock.
Leading UK companies taking part included Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller Theatre Company (presenting The Taming of the Shrew), Kneehigh, aandbc and Forkbeard Fantasy.
New venues, new work
In order to accommodate the breadth of programming, which will see multiple interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s more popular plays, the RSC will inaugurate several new venues. In addition to its standard spaces - the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Swan and the still-to-be-erected Courtyard Theatre, which will act as an interim main house while the RST undergoes a £100 million redevelopment (See News, 22 Sep 2004) – festival performances will be held in a new riverside amphitheatre called The Dell; in the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried; in a new 100-seat studio created within the RST auditorium; and at other one-off sites (eg homeless people theatre company Cardboard Citizens will stage Timon of Athens as a management training course at a local hotel).
The Complete Works will also feature new large-scale pieces by contemporary playwrights reflecting on Shakespeare. Roy Williams’ response to Much Ado About Nothing is set against the backdrop of the Iraq War, Leo Butler’s take on The Tempest explores issues of faith in a foreign land, and Rona Munro will re-imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In conjunction with the festival, the company has also teamed up with publishers Macmillan and Random House to publish a new ‘RSC edition’ of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, the first edition of the 21st century and the first to be published based on the First Folio since 1709.
Fulfilling promises
Speaking at this afternoon’s press conference, held at British Telecom Tower in London, Sir Christopher Bland, chairman of the RSC (and BT), said that The Complete Works is a reflection of the RSC’s growing financial and artistic confidence under artistic director Michael Boyd who, when he took over two years ago, inherited a demoralised and debt-ridden company from his predecessor Adrian Noble.
When asked today why the RSC was undertaking the year-long event, Boyd gave two complementary answers: “to fulfil our promises” and “because we can”. Acknowledging the company’s previous challenges when expanding on the latter, he said: “There have been times in our history when our size has felt cumbersome; right now it feels very useful. We are big enough to do this.”
Boyd further explained in a statement issued today: “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.”
The festival director is Deborah Shaw who joined the RSC in 2004 from the Bath Shakespeare Festival. Her earlier appointments include artistic director of the Chester Gateway Theatre and associate director at Watford Palace Theatre. Booking for the first half of the festival (April to October 2006) opens to the public on 5 September 2005. Full programming details for the second half will be released in January 2005.
- by Terri Paddock
Related Content
