This January, the Royal Shakespeare Company invited theatre critics to a jolly breakfast and Q&A to introduce its new co-artistic directors, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans. One of my colleagues punctured the cosy atmosphere with the first question. “Why,” she asked, “has the RSC been completely absent from the national conversation over the past decade?” Evans, a jovial man accustomed to holding a room, looked momentarily lost for words.
My colleague wasn’t wrong. In the 1990s and 2000s, the RSC dominated conversations about culture and national identity. On the positive side, David Oyelowo was cast in 2000 as the first black actor to play one of Shakespeare’s English kings. On the negative, artistic director Adrian Noble’s 2002 proposal to tear down the main Stratford theatre, putatively replacing it with a “Shakespeare Village” of alternative spaces, provoked an outcry and an industry-wide debate about the decline of traditional stages.
In recent years, there have been fewer controversies, but also fewer excitements. Former artistic director Gregory Doran developed a respected personal brand for himself as an expert on Shakespeare’s texts, recently publishing My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey through the First Folio. His deputy, Erica Whyman, spent years quietly building the company’s outreach and diversity, as well as keeping the whole place together. She stepped up as acting artistic director in September 2021 to handle the double-whammy of a Covid-inspired financial crisis and Doran’s departure to care for his terminally ill husband, the widely-loved RSC actor Antony Sher.
If the RSC has fallen off the map, the causes are largely external. Ever since Noble broke the RSC’s formal relationship with London’s Barbican Centre in the early 2000s, the company has been first and foremost a Warwickshire regional theatre—albeit one with regular transfers to the West End, and critical pressure to keep up with London trends and mores. But the tastes of theatregoers in Stratford-upon-Avon—including the thousands of tourists visiting every year, keen to cap their tour of Shakespeare’s birthplace with a performance of one of his plays—are increasingly distinct from London’s theatre habitués.
This isn’t simply a matter of differing attitudes to culture war touchpapers such as race and gender. Nor is it the case that Stratford lacks a diverse and urban audience—Harvey and Evans are at pains to point out that Birmingham, one of the country’s youngest and most racially diverse cities, is on its doorstep, as is Coventry—though there is more work to do in outreach to that audience. Whyman forged strong links to Coventry during its year, in 2021, as UK City of Culture, a foundation for which she is a trustee, directing a 24-hour festival of street theatre named Faith.
But the RSC faces unusual pressures to be all things to all people: not resourced like the National Theatre, but still a national treasure. Can Harvey and Evans rise to the challenge? They have the right experience. An established team who have worked together before, they have each also led and grown major regional theatres.
Harvey spent nine years at Theatr Clwyd, Wales’s biggest producing theatre, where she was notable for her ability to build partnerships with major institutions and funding bodies. The RSC, desperately in need of more outward-facing relationships, will benefit deeply from that experience. Evans himself was born a Welshman, and his career has taken him to lead the major theatres in Sheffield and Chichester. He began his career as a performer, winning two Oliviers for musical theatre roles, and will lead the RSC’s production of Edward II next spring. But noises around his appointment suggest that, rather than seeking out an actor-manager, the RSC was drawn to his track record of running and expanding the footprint of a regional theatre.
What does that mean for the work on stage? Summer in Stratford means tourists, and Harvey and Evans have built their first season around two comedy crowd-pleasers, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The School for Scandal. But, even so, the signs are good.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is routinely described as Shakespeare’s sitcom; a farce in which two suburban housewives tease the sex-pest John Falstaff without ever quite cheating on their husbands. I’ve rarely found much substance in the text, but Blanche McIntyre’s production has garnered well-deserved critical raves. Her achievement is to draw out the parallels to Shakespeare’s darker, more substantive works, taking us aback with jabs of human frailty. When Richard Goulding, as a husband driven to madness by unfounded jealousy, begs the forgiveness of his falsely accused wife, we could be watching Leontes’s reconciliation with Hermione in the melancholic The Winter’s Tale. That’s not to say the comedy—or topicality—is missing. A troop of visiting “Germans”—probably a reference by Shakespeare to a German ally of Elizabeth I who was obsessed with obtaining Windsor’s Order of the Garter—become football fans watching the Euros.
Some supporting actors have that old RSC tendency to chew the scenery and over-articulate vowels in a desperate attempt to insinuate meaning from Shakespeare’s more obscure archaisms. But unlike Shakespeare’s Globe in London, which routinely shreds Shakespeare’s texts into ribbons to build new, politically acceptable scripts, McIntyre’s production shows an RSC that isn’t afraid of tackling Shakespeare’s text in full—almost. Prospect readers should book—as they should for The School for Scandal, which opens in July, directed by rising star Tinuke Craig.
Harvey and Evans have also programmed three shows that signal a clear intention to push the RSC towards a more radical and political body of new work. The Buddha of Suburbia, an adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s hit 1990 novel, is perhaps the gentlest and best, in a dynamic production by Emma Rice. Rice’s production pulls no punches when it comes to the racism experienced by south-Asian families in the face of 1970s fascism—and the reverberations today—but the shrewd satire of social pretension is as lightly comic as it was in Kureishi’s novel. (Though readers who remember the scene in which a professional dominatrix loses her contact lens while disciplining a rockstar client may be mildly disappointed by its omission here.) It already has a transfer to London announced.
There were also positive reviews for English, a sensitive drama by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi, which portrays a class of adult students in the city of Karaj, Iran, prepping for an English test that is their ticket to work abroad. Toossi’s meditations on language and the soul are thoughtful. But with its focus on the day-to-day aspirations of its characters, the play felt oddly shy about addressing questions of life under religious fundamentalism, or the difficulty of emigrating during geopolitical conflict. (I saw it at London’s Kiln, which co-produced the show—another example of the RSC’s growing London links.)
‘Kyoto’ could have been programmed solely to extend a middle finger at the RSC’s former sponsors BP
But it is with climate change play Kyoto, just opened at Stratford and sure to have a further life, that the new RSC lays out its political stall. From radical theatre-makers Good Chance, better known for their work with migrants in Calais, the production could have been programmed solely to extend a middle finger at the RSC’s former sponsors BP.
This is the story of the negotiations that built the UN’s Kyoto Protocol of 1997, undermined all the way by sinewy American oil lobbyist and narrator Don Pearlman. Who else but director Stephen Daldry could manage to make set-pieces out of rows around UN roundtables? Lurking in the shadows and paying Pearlman are the men in black coats—their leader eventually reveals he is rebranding his organisation as “Beyond Petroleum”, and “art-washing” his brand through sponsoring arts organisations. It has force. But it is hectoring and simplistic compared to other plays about diplomacy in whose steps it follows, notably JT Rogers’s Israel-Palestine drama Oslo.
This is the programme of a duo determined to make the RSC relevant and contemporary. The summer festivities—which also opened with a successful Love’s Labour’s Lost—suggest they know how to retain the theatre’s core audience. There are still tests to pass. Evans and Harvey haven’t yet shown us they can do the meaty tragedies, though several are coming down the pipeline (Luke Thallon’s turn as Hamlet will be a major event next winter, as will Will Keen’s Iago opposite John Douglas Thompson’s Othello). And will their determination to take on organisations like BP get them into trouble? Perhaps. But they are bound to get noticed.
