RSC unveils 2020 summer season including Miles Jupp and programme of European work

The RSC has unveiled its summer 2020 season including a major programme exploring the UK's relationship with Europe.

Deputy artistic director Erica Whyman will reunite with designer Tom Piper and composer Isobel Waller-Bridge to direct The Winter's Tale from 28 March to 2 October, with costumes by Madeleine Girling, lighting by Prema Mehta, sound by Jeremy Dunn and movement by Anna Morrissey. The production will see "the ghosts of fascist Europe collide with horrors of The Handmaid's Tale".

Blanche McIntyre will helm a new production of Pericles (which will be staged for the first time in 20 years in Stratford) from 15 August to 1 October. The production has design by Robert Innes Hopkins, music by Tim Sutton and sound by Emma Laxton.

Miles Jupp will star as Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors, directed by Phillip Breen and running from 25 April to 3 October. Design is by Max Jones, lighting by Tina MacHugh, sound by Dyfan Jones and fights by Renny Krupinski.

After their run in Stratford-upon-Avon, the productions transfer to the Barbican from October 2020 to January 2021 for the RSC's London Season, followed by a national tour of The Winter's Tale in 2021.

In the Swan Theatre, associate artist Maria Åberg will oversee a programme called Projekt Europa, designed to explore, interrogate and celebrate the relationship between the UK and Europe.

Åberg and Judith Gerstenberg will adapt Patrik Ouředník's Europeana, which runs from 9 April to 25 July. Based on 100 years of European history, the Czech play is a whimsical exploration of the continent on the 20th century.

Gerstenberg will also present a new adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, directed by Barbara Frey. It runs from 1 May to 23 September.

Based on the Nobel Prize-winning novels by José Saramago, Blindness and Seeing will be the final show in the season. Adapted and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, artistic
director of the Teatro Nacional D Maria II in Lisbon from a translation by Daniel Hahn, the show runs from 1 August to 26 September.

Outside of Stratford, the company will transfer Kunene and the King to the West End (as previously announced), while Kathryn Hunter will star in Timon of Athens in New York and Washington in 2020. Justin Audibert's gender-swapping Taming of the Shrew will run in Chicago, Washington, Seoul and Tokyo.

The company has also announced a new immersive digital version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with full details being announced in January 2020.