RSC Opens Complete Works Festival at WeekendDate: 21 April 2006
The Royal Shakespeare Company launches the most ambitious project in its 45-year history, the Complete Works, this weekend (22-23 April) in Stratford-upon-Avon (See News, 8 Feb 2006). Dedicated to staging all 37 of the bard’s plays as well as his collection of sonnets and longer poems, the Complete Works marks the first time that the bard’s entire canon has ever been presented at one event.
Appropriately timed to coincide with Shakespeare’s birthday, the opening weekend of the year-long festival comprises an Open Day on Saturday and a series of special events, including backstage tours, masterclasses, fight workshops and a football match between the Montagues and the Capulets.
The first two productions in the Complete Works schedule – the RSC’s own stagings of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, the latter starring Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter – opened this past Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Over the next 12 months, the RSC will itself stage 23 new in-house productions and will welcome more than 30 other professional companies from across the UK and around the globe.
Upcoming RSC highlights include: Patrick Stewart playing Prospero in The Tempest, 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, in a production directed by former RSC artistic director Trevor Nunn, which will bring the event to an end in April 2007. Current 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.
The programme also sees the return of RSC founder and inaugural artistic director Sir Peter Hall with his first UK production of Measure for Measure. Sir Peter’s son Edward Hall will bring his own company, the all-male Propeller ensemble, to Stratford with a new staging of The Taming of the Shrew. Meanwhile, Samuel West, previously one of the RSC’s leading men and now artistic director of Sheffield Theatres, will offer his Sheffield staging of As You Like It. Other UK companies taking part include Kneehigh, aandbc, Cardboard Citizens and Forkbeard Fantasy.
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: Berliner Ensemble’s restaging of Richard II, 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 an 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.
In order to accommodate the breadth of programming, which covers multiple interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s more popular plays, the RSC is inaugurating several new venues. In addition to its standard spaces - the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Swan and the 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 are being held in a new riverside amphitheatre called The Dell; in the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried; in a new 100-seat studio called The Cube and installed within the RST auditorium; and at other one-off sites.
The festival also features four new commissions inspired by Shakespeare’s plays and written by leading contemporary playwrights: Rona Munro’s The Indian Boy (written in response to A Midsummer Night’s Dream); Roy Williams’ Days of Significance (Much Ado About Nothing); Leo Butler’s One of These Days (The Tempest) and Peter Straughan’s Regime Change (Julius Caesar).
At last year’s initial press launch for the Complete Works (See News, 11 Jul 2005), 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.”
- by Terri Paddock
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