Royal Shakespeare Company Production Research Articles

Waiting for Lear: Re-creations of Shakespeare’s Play Through Beckett at the Royal Shakespeare Company

Stage productions of King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) have played a key role in reinventing the play for each new generation. Every production finds unique ways of presenting Lear, each of which adds new layers of meanings that can potentially shape our understanding of the play. In the 1960s, romanticized and naturalistic approaches that had governed the staging of the play were displaced by a modern conception of King Lear as Shakespeare’s Endgame. This article examines comparatively how dramatic forms emblematic of Samuel Beckett’s theatre were assimilated into three distinct RSC productions of King Lear, directed by Peter Brook (1962), Adrian Noble (1982) and Gregory Doran (2016). Beckett’s enduring influence on the play’s afterlife foregrounds both the practices of appropriation and transformation of previous texts that shape contemporary Shakespearean performance, and the dialogic interplay of textual and non-textual elements through which Shakespeare’s play has acquired meaning on the RSC stage. The appropriations of Beckettian patterns were shaped by the tensions between text and performance, and the battle between centripetal and centrifugal forces that intersect dialogically in the processes of meaning-making within Shakespearean performance.

“There would this monster make a man”: Colonial power in the 1993 RSC production of 'The Tempest'

Taking on assumptions about oppression, identity and representation as they are developed in contemporary postcolonial theory, this study proposes the analysis of the 1993 theatrical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). It aims to discuss the role of Caliban's monstrosity in the production and how it pertains to issues such as power relations and spectacle. The main benefit of doing an analysis of a performance of a Shakespearean text seems to be the possibility of seeing the play's meaning as contingent, as a result of a series of elements (actor's body, visual clues, the theatrical institution, spectatorship) that release it from the burden of being considered as the work of a single, universal, non- contradictory mind that contemporary criticism has pointed out as the 'Shakespeare Myth'. I conclude that the 1993 RSC production presents a Tempest that, in many ways, reinforces traditional positions about the legitimacy of Prospero's dominion over the island.---Original in English.---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1210

Review of Royal Shakespeare Company Production of Mary Pix’s The Beau Defeated, retitled The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich

Review of Royal Shakespeare Company Production of Mary Pix’s The Beau Defeated, retitled The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich

A Midsummer Night's (Different) Dream(s): The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1972 Tour of Eastern Europe

Sitting between the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and a Vice-President of the Council of State for Cultural and Socialist Education in the official box at the Opera House for the gala première of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” on 23 October and watching those adroit fairies prepare Bottom for his night of love with Titania, I began to get an uneasy feeling that things were not going well as I observed their consternation and embarrassment at the erotic miming before us. This impression was confirmed by their almost monosyllabic comments at my reception during the interval. “Très intéressant” said Gliga, but then words failed him; “très piquant” said [Ion] Blad—a more apposite comment on the scene than perhaps intended, but even this faint praise clearly left other thoughts unexpressed. . . . However, on the following day my Cultural Attaché and later the manager of the Company were called to a 2 1/2-hour meeting with ARIA, the Romanian State impresarios, to hear their “suggestions” for the modification of the “Phallic Bottom” episode; but the manager insisted that he had no power to alter Peter Brook's masterpiece in any way at all and this particular scene in fact remained unaltered during the remainder of the run.—D. R. Ashe On 31 October 1972, Derick Rosslyn Ashe, the British ambassador to Romania, sent this strictly confidential report to J. L. Bullard, the head of the East European and Soviet Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. His report was written a few days after the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) had completed its tour in Romania, which took place from 22 to 28 October 1972. Although Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream had originally premiered on 27 August 1970 at Stratford-upon-Avon, the British Council chose it for a tour of Eastern Europe in 1972, and the company played it in Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Zagreb, and Warsaw.

Cyberformance and the Cyberstage

Investigating the historical and cultural emergence of grafting the internet technology into the contemporary theatre practice, this paper discusses the socio-political character of the cyberspace use as a theatrical stage, suggesting the term cyberstage to describe this phenomenon. Drawing on Helen Varley Jamieson's definition of cyberformance, a live performance that utilises internet technologies to bring remote performers together in real time, for remote and/or proximal audiences (Jamieson, 2008, p.34), the use of cyberstage is analyzed in the following three online performance cases: Helen Varley Jamieson's Make-Shift (2010), a networked performance collaboration with Paula Crutchlow, Dries Verhoeven's performance Life Streaming (2010) and the Royal Shakespeare Company's production Such Tweet Sorrow (2010). The substructures of an internet-based theatre have already been set, attracting many contemporary artists to experiment with that tool, foregrounding questions about the future of cyberformance and the theatre presence in cyberspace. The paper discusses the developmental potential of cyberformance as dealt with by Dixon (2004), Jamieson (2008) and Kattenbeld (2010).

As we like it? A collective review of Shakespeare's As You Like It (directed by Michael Boyd for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 5 September 2009

This is an edited transcript of a review group (of about 75 people) which took place at the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 6 September 2009, the contributors having seen the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of As You Like It the previous evening. The discussion was designed to address the production and then to develop into a reflection on the processes of reviewing itself asking such questions as “how did the production speak to our times?”, “what is worth remembering about this production?”, “why is your opinion valuable?” and “what difference would you like your review to make?” Participants included journalists, theatre directors, theatre designers, performers, academics, graduate, undergraduate and high school students, and interested members of the public. In publishing these fragmented opinions and reflections, we are interested in creating a space in the theatrical archive for a polyphonic review, one that gathers a range of unattributed voices and, as far as possible, allows them to co-exist without hierarchy or resolution. Initially the discussion took place in small groups and then in a single, very large circle. The first 10 quotations below summarize group discussions; from that point on, individuals made contributions on any aspect of the production they wished to discuss.

Unstaging King Lear

In 2008, Singapore audiences were treated to two large-scale King Lear productions: the internationally acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company's production, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellen in the lead role, and Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia's The King Lear Project: A Trilogy. The two productions are drastically different in that the former is a production of King Lear proper, while the latter is an experimental project that uses Lear as a frame to explore, discover and critique the nature of stagecraft and audience perception through a series of notable Lear essays. The King Lear Project is not an adaptation of Lear, but a three-night performance about the play. Ho and Borgia's work questions if it is possible to stage Lear, and if there is in fact a ‘right’ and ‘proper’ way to do so. For local audiences, these questions are immensely provocative for several reasons, especially since the Nunn–McKellen Lear has since been declared – by way of critical reviews – the definitive King Lear. The metatheatricality of the Lear Project implicates audience members and demands an understanding from them through active engagement that is otherwise not required in conventional productions. Ho and Borgia's assumptions of audience perception are strikingly accurate and telling, and they consider the complex negotiations between literary and theatrical experiences, or what Ho calls ‘Word and Flesh’. By turning to the history and the processes of staging what is believed to be Shakespeare's most ‘unstageable’ tragedy, the Lear Project also questions the future of Shakespeare's modern theatre. This dossier, which includes an in-depth review of the play, a commentary by an actor in the play, and an interview with the author/director of the Lear Project, hopes to construct a critical and insightful understanding of the making and reception of this original and ambitious piece of work.

Shakespeare's history cycle in performance: Actor and audience perspectives

This article is concerned with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) performances of Shakespeare's history plays as a sequence in regnal order as part of the Complete Works season of 2006, and previous such serializations. Surveying the problems of coherence when the plays are unified into an artistic singularity, the article pays particular attention to the ways that actors playing the same characters in different plays (that is, playing “through-casting”) approach their work. Drawing on an interview with Geoffrey Streatfeild (Prince Hal in the RSC production), the article weighs up the critical and performative gains and losses that follow from putting the history plays together in this way.

Plus ça change …?

Who remembers the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Romeo and Juliet that followed the brilliant Peter Brook conception? Who can speak for 10 minutes about the U.S. President who succeeded Abraham Lincoln? How (if he hadn't lost his head for being a tax farmer) would Lavoisier have topped his discovery of the existence of oxygen? These thoughts crossed my mind on January 3rd as I took over day-to-day editorial responsibility for International Psychogeriatrics from Robin Eastwood.

Ninagawa's Production of Euripides' Medea

The Japanese theater director Yukio Ninagawa, known for expressing his opposition to repressive politics in his productions during the 1960s, claimed that he staged the Medea because he wanted Japanese women to know that they could be as strong, as straightforward, as the character Medea. Japan, which has been the largest consumer of his Medea, was and still is a male-dominated society. According to Ninagawa, it is a country in which for a woman to be demure and weak is considered a virtue. 1 And yet, if you look closely at Euripides' Medea you might conclude that Medea, although strong, is not an ideal role model for women. 2 (This was the view of Leda Geh of the Singapore Sunday Star, who reviewed Ninagawa's production in 1992.) Ninagawa's Medea was enormously successful. It ran for more than 250 performances in Japan, in other parts of Asia, and in the West, even though all the performances were in the Japanese language. Between the first productions of the Medea in 1978 and the latest in 1999, Ninagawa played to oversold, sold-out, or virtually sold-out houses in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, as well as in smaller cities throughout Japan. 3 The 1993 [End Page 1] production in Tokyo had a three-night run, in a theater with a capacity of eight hundred seats, which was on average 84 percent filled. 4 During a second tour to Athens in 1984, over a two-night run at the Herodes Atticus Theater (which has a capacity of six thousand people), fourteen thousand attended the performances. According to the producer Tadao Nakane (whom I interviewed in Tokyo on 15 March 1999), the audiences, including those sitting on the sides of the Acropolis, applauded so long and hard that tears came to his eyes. 5 In London, in 1978, Tokusaburo Arashi's performance of Medea brought him a nomination for an Olivier award 6 and, in the fall of 1999, Ninagawa served as the first non-English-speaking foreign director of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of King Lear. Given these and other successes, it is clear that Ninagawa was able to bridge the gap between the West and East, on the one hand, by appealing to Western audiences with his Japanese productions and, on the other, by bringing a Western play to Japanese and other audiences. In this article I will consider how Ninagawa was able to take this ancient Greek tragedy and make it popular, not only with other Asian or non-Japanese audiences but also with those in Japan. He based his Medea on the poet Mutsuo Takahashi's 7 line-by-line adaptation of Euripides' [End Page 2] Medea. Not all of Takahashi's lines are used in each production; however, Ninagawa's productions of Medea, like his production of Oedipus the King, do adhere to the words of the text much more closely and fully than do Tadashi Suzuki's Bacchae or Trojan Women. Ninagawa infused his productions of the Medea with a very strong Japanese presence, consisting of elements drawn from Japan past and present. And it is these elements that I believe have helped ensure his success with Japanese audiences who (like us) bring their own cultural baggage to the theater. To demonstrate the Japanese content of the productions, I draw on a live performance of the Medea that I saw in Tokyo in 1993 and on my translations from the Japanese of both Takahashi's adaptation of Euripides' text and Tange Kazuhiko's translation from the ancient Greek. 8 I also draw on programs, playbills, the published notes of Ninagawa, and videotapes of productions. I hope to show how Ninagawa infused the Greek tragedy with a Japanese presence in the Tokyo production of 1993 and to note how that production differed from the version of his Medea performed in Athens in 1984. I place the Tokyo performance within its cultural context by pointing out the Japanese elements...

Brooks/Jackson’s level Cleopatra: production and reception

The influence which current views on dramatic theory and technique have exercised upon theatrical productions has long been the object of scholarly inquiry. Peter Brook’s The Empty Space (1968; rpt. 1990), for instance, can be a helpful tool in the study of Brook’s own 1978 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra, with Glenda Jackson and Alan Howard in the title roles. The production followed by eight years the now legendary “circus” Midsummer Night’s Dream which Brook had staged for the RSC in 1970, and reviewers were virtually unanimous in praising the production’s innovative, swiftly-paced set.

On Stage

'"é3Sí£(í&JUDITHFISHER STAGE?=^ "^^fine«'J University There's bound to be an adaptation of A CHRISTMAS CAROL playing at a theatre near you, but because most of them close before the end of December 1997, Tve not included many. But I have included several productions in major U.S. cities, should you be travelling south during the upcoming conference season. CANADA: SASKATCHEWAN Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens Globe Theatre, Regina· 18 - 30 April 1998 · A new adaptation by Richard Ouzounian. UNITED STATES: ASHLAND Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov Oregon Shakespeare Festival· 22 April - 31 October 1998 · ATLANTA Candida by George Bernard Shaw Actor's Express·20 February - 5 April 1998 · The Turn of the Screw by Henry James· 24 April - 31 May 1998 · Actor's Express Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher. CHICAGO The Seagull by Anton Chekov Josephine Louis Theatre, Northwestern University · 24 April - 3 May 1998 · This production by the Theatre Department ofthe University is being presented as part of the international conference "Chekov in Performance" to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Moscow Art Theatre's first production. DALLAS An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde Dallas Theatre Centre· 14 January - 8 February 1998 · 300 Victorian Review NEW YORK Jekyll and Hyde Plymouth Theatre, NYC· still running · This musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel by Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn, directed by Robin Phillips, now stars Robert Cuccioli, Linda Eder and Christine Noll. A Flea in Her Ear by George Feydeau Roundabout Theatre, NYC· 1 1 February - 3 May 1998 · Adapted by Jean-Marie Beset: translated by Mark OOonnell. Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw Irish Repertory, NYC 7"Ae Heiress by Henry James Syracuse Stage, Syracuse Adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz. PHILADELPHIA Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen Arden Theatre Company SAN FRANCISCO Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller American Conservatory Theatre SEATTLE Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Bathhouse Theatre Adapted by Gale Fury Childs. An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde Seattle Repertory Theatre • opened 24 November 1997 · - 27 February - 8 March 1998 · • 22 January - 8 March 1998 ·¦26 March -26 April 1998· 21 April -31 May 1998·¦ 7 March - 12 April 1998 · ENGLAND: LONDON Oliver by Lionel Bart London Palladium· still running · This musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel now stars Jim Dale as Fagin. The Magistrate by Arthur Wing Pinero Savoy Theatre Stars Ian Richardson.¦ opened 9 December 1997 · On Stage301 An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen Olivier, Royal National Theatre· until 22 January 1998 · Adapted by Christopher Hampton, designed by John Napier, starring Sir Ian McKellan. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand Lyric Theatre· opened 27 November 1997 · A new version by Anthony Burgess, starring Anthony Sher. Little Eyotf by Henrik Ibsen The Pit, Barbican Centre· until 7 February 1998 · Royal Shakespeare Company's production, directed by Adrian Noble. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Springfield Theatre, Bounds Green road· until 1 1 January 1998 · David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Greenwich Theatre· until 24 January 1998 · ...

Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Half Season,” April-September 1996

For many years Royal Shakespeare Company's productions have followed a settled routine -a season in Stratford from April to January, followed by a residence in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and subsequent transfer of plays to Barbican in London. Now, as part of a change in company's touring policy, Stratford season has been retimed (October-August), residencies increased in number (two during September-November), and stay in London cut to five months (December-April). To facilitate this change, 1996 Stratford season ran from April to September, and repertoire was shipped immediately to London. Revivals of Adrian Noble's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Cheny Orchard played in Stratford for a few weeks (prior to a tour and a London West End transfer, respectively), and new-style 1996-97 Stratford season opened in November with Eveiyman at The Other Place, Henry VIII at Swan, and Much Ado About Nothing at main house. The consequences of this change-particularly in terms of economics-have been hotly debated, and it has been suggested that RSC's enhanced commitment to the regions might make itself felt at expense of other companies touring Shakespeare. Defenders of Barbican, both as a theater and, with RSC in residence, as part of capital's cultural provision, have been incensed. Fears have been expressed about fate of other companies if Arts Council should decide that RSC residencies in Plymouth and Newcastle should be considered in allocating funds to local or touring ensembles in southwest and northeast. Meanwhile, Stratford theaters, with their regular local clientele of Midlands theatergoers (including schools and colleges) as well as considerable passing trade of tourists, must overcome season's opening being launched at a time-late autumn-when local audiences often dwindle and continuing through first quarter of new year, when tourism is at its lowest. After a brief visit from a revival of IanJudge's 1994 Twelfth Night (21 March-10 April), 1996 short season opened in mid-April and offered three Shakespeare plays at main house (As You Like It, Macbeth, and Troilus and Cressida) and one at The Other Place (The Comedy of Errors, prior to a regional tour), where The Learned Ladies (a version of Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes) and Peter Whelan's new play, The Herbal Bed, were also staged. Webster's The White Devil, Three Hours after Marriage (Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot), and Richard Nelson's A General from America were presented at Swan. Stephen Pimlott's As You Like It was a strangely muted affair. It began promisingly, with an energetic and physically formidable Orlando (Liam Cunningham) fretting dangerously in front of a cold, aluminum-colored drop, and moved to an equally frigid court, an aluminum-box set with a shiny floor and occasional steely pillar. The court costumes were rich, somber, and elaborately Elizabethan, with vivid yellow, green, and red of Touchstone's motley as principal source of warmth. The usurper (Calum Convey), who was given to alternately menacing and vulnerable grimaces and who swooned at news of Celia's desertion, was clearly a tortured soul, and his court was a chilly, threatening place. The Forest of Arden was at first scarcely more welcoming: same metal walls, a few more pillars (now seeming like denuded tree trunks), and a snowstorm. For exiled Duke Senior (Robert Demeger) to exclaim Sweet are uses of adversity in teeth of a blizzard, while his men huddled and stamped,

:Othello: A Contextual History

Introduction Part I. Jacobean Contexts: 1. Global discourse: Venetians and Turks 2. Military discourse: knights and mercenaries 3. Racial discourse: black and white 4. Marital discourse: husbands and wives Part II. Representations: 5. Othello in Restoration England 6. Amateur versus professional: the Delaval Othello 7. William Charles Macready and the domestic Othello 8. Salvini, Irving, and the dissociation of intellect 9. 'The Ethiopian Moor': Paul Robeson's Othello 10. Orson Welles and the patriarchal eye 11. Othello for the 1990s: Trevor Nunn's 1989 Royal Shakespeare Company production Conclusion.

After Chernobyl.

BIR BulletinPublished Online:29 May 2014https://doi.org/10.1259/0007-1285-60-714-B29SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail AboutAbstract“Now, what I want is FACTS”: Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1812–1870)Every aspect of the Chernobyl accident cannot be included in the space of a few pages and since the cause of the accident (mainly human error but with design faults contributing) has been described in many publications, as have the effects of the fallout on the food chain, this short review does not include these topics. An assessment of the number of excess cancer deaths due to the Chernobyl accident has also been excluded, for the good reason that accurate predictions are not yet available. “After Chernobyl” is therefore a factual account of interesting information on the evacuation and relocation of the population within a 30 km zone around the power plant, of decontamination efforts, of the entombment of the reactor (termed colloquially “the Sarcophagus”, a title used by the Science Correspondent of Pravda, Vladimir Gubaryev, for the play widely performed in the Soviet Union and which in April–June 1987 was a Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Barbican Theatre in the City of London), and of the heroic firemen of Chernobyl, not all of whom survived. Previous article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 60, Issue 714June 1987Pages: 519-B36 © The British Institute of Radiology History Published onlineMay 29,2014 Metrics Download PDF

A Review of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Production of "Nicholas Nickleby"

A Review of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Production of "Nicholas Nickleby"

The Royal Shakespeare Company's Production of Henry V (edited by Sally Beauman)

<i>The Royal Shakespeare Company's Production of Henry V</i> (edited by Sally Beauman)

GÜnter Grass: A Kashubian G.B.S.

IN THE LONDON THEATER, the summer of 1970 was notable mainly for the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Günter Grass's play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising.The play was four years old, but it had not been seen in Britain before, and Herr Grass, much admired here as a novelist for the past ten years, has for the first time made an impression on the English theatrical consciousness. The impact of the play has been forceful, but the reactions of the reviewers have been remarkably confused; several journalists, normally comfortable in a professional blandness, have reacted to the play with a degree of waspishness which suggests they are out of their critical depths.

The Epistemological Quest in Pinter's "The Homecoming"

No one denied the brilliance of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Homecoming when it was first produced in London in 1965 or later in New York in 1967. Harold Pinter's mysterious play elicited, however, responses that ranged from bafflement to outrage. One English critic found the key to the meaning of the play in the chance remark of a member of the audience that the characters all

Music for the Royal Shakespeare Company Productions

Music for the Royal Shakespeare Company Productions