Boyd Lets Go on RSC’s Free-standing London Home???

Finding a permanent home in London for the Royal Shakespeare Company was one of the main reasons that has kept Michael Boyd in the job of artistic director for nearly ten years. But, speaking at a press briefing today to announce the company’s 2012/13 winter season, and his last, Boyd admitted that, on the advice of former Globe artistic director Mark Rylance, “I will have to let it go”. The RSC has not had a base in London since its 2001 withdrawal from the Barbican Centre, its purpose-built second home for two decades – a decision made by Boyd’s predecessor, Adrian Noble.

Amongst the suggestions mooted by journalists at today’s event in London was that the company take over one of the building’s Olympic Park after this summer’s Games, but Boyd said that was rather too far east and “too much Stratford” for the company’s capital residence. He has long said that the “most likely” solution would be a found space, and today he pushed his preference for using the free-standing replica auditorium created for the company’s six-week visit last summer to New York’s Park Avenue Armoury. It the RSC were able to find the right space to erect it and could get planning permission to build box office, toilet and other facilities around it, “this could make a London home affordable,” he said. He’s leaving out figuring how that might be done to the RSC’s new chairman Nigel Hugill.