Royal Shakespeare Company Research Articles

Review of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (Directed by Emily Burns for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 15 May 2024

Review of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (Directed by Emily Burns for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 15 May 2024

Translating and performing China for the English-speaking stage: Royal Shakespeare Company’s re-staging of The Injustice to Dou E

Contemporary China is increasingly open in its interaction with the global cultural community, generating one of the most prestigious projects—the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Chinese Classics Translation Projects” (2015–2023). This article examines this project’s first production Snow in Midsummer, a performance based on a new translation of the Chinese classic Dou E Yuan (窦娥冤, The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth). Through exploring the multiple agents involved in the RSC’s re-staging of the play, this article traces the processes of translation and performance characterised by an oft-hidden collaborative agency. It uncovers the collaborative agency at work and argues that the agency in this theatre production aims to set the conditions to make the original Chinese classic new, so as to enable its rejuvenation and transformation. Key finding of this article is that the collaborative agency of the translator, playwright, director, stage designer, and actors/actresses in re-staging has enlivened the 13th-century Chinese classic with enriched narratives and produced a performance that is nuanced and relevant to the contemporary world. This article makes a case for the paradigmatic shift from a product-based approach to theatre translation to a process-based one. It opens new avenues to future research into the question of complexity of collaborative agency in restaging the foreign classic to the contemporary English-speaking audiences for both areas of theatre translation for performance and transnational theatre production.

Cymbeline by Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (review)

Cymbeline by Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (review)

Hamnet by Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions, in association with Hera Pictures at the Garrick Theatre (review)

Hamnet by Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions, in association with Hera Pictures at the Garrick Theatre (review)

Dreaming of new musical interaction – the interactive music in the project Dream

ABSTRACT Dream was an online live performance in early 2021 and was a collaboration between several partners, among them Royal Shakespeare Company, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Manchester International Festival and EPIC Games. The stated goal of Dream was to explore new ways of interacting with audiences while bridging the disciplines of theatre, music, video games and other forms of digital media. The musical goals were to enable a high level of musical interactivity while at the same time coupling that with the use of high-quality recorded orchestral music. This article is not a study of the Dream project as a whole, but focuses on the interactive music that was generated in realtime by the actors and powered by Reactional Music. Apart from briefly discussing the technology itself, this article will describe and analyse some of the working processes involved in composing interactive music, as well as discuss some of the future implications of the use of technology from the video game industry in new areas such as live performances and audience interaction. The aim of this is to see if it’s possible to envision what kind of new artistic output that can come from these new technological environments.

Review of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Directed by Wils Wilson for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 20 September 2023

Review of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Directed by Wils Wilson for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 20 September 2023

Exhibiting the Nation: Identity and (Post)colonial Aesthetics in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

Hannah Khalil’s play A Museum in Baghdad and its 2019 staging by the Royal Shakespeare Company focus on the complex relationship between museum and theatre as memory institutions. This relationship was enhanced by metatheatrical connections between the performance of the museum on stage, the accompanying displays in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre lobby and gift shop, and the spectators who entered the Swan Theatre auditorium. The exploration of the intricate exchange between performance, space, and audience reveals the paramount importance of two specific issues: the politics of display and the performative aspect of nation-making within national institutions. Using postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, my analysis probes the ways in which theatre may offer a better understanding of dramaturgies of display in museums through the exposure and critique of the complex cultural and social challenges that emerge from the interdependence between national cultural institutions and official narratives of belonging (such as the lack of representation of marginalized communities, homogenized views of cultural development, or targeted financial support for institutions that adhere to state narratives). Khalil’s theatrical depiction of the political intricacies of curatorial decision-making allows for a sobering examination of both the role of museums in the creation of national narratives of identity and the responsibility of the theatre to uncover the cultural mechanisms used to enforce such narratives.

Review of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (Directed by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 23 May 2023

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Harold Pinter: Stages, Networks, Collaborations

Harold Pinter: Stages, Networks, Collaborations

Dr Jekyll and/or Mr Hyde: The two versions of David Edgar’s stage adaptation

In 1991, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged David Edgar’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 novella, directed by Peter Wood, to a generally negative critical and commercial response. Five years later, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre produced Edgar’s revised version of the play, using the shorter title Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to much more positive reviews, often from the same people. The striking thing about this radically different response is that, apart from a single element, the two scripts are very similar. They can therefore serve almost as a real-life scientific experiment, demonstrating the difference that a single change will make. This article will consider the various choices that an adaptor may make with this story and look at what the different responses to the two versions can tell us about the nature of this story, and possibly about horror and fantasy in general.

Henry VI: Rebellion; Henry VI: The Wars of the Roses; Richard III Presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (review)

Henry VI: Rebellion; Henry VI: The Wars of the Roses; Richard III Presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (review)

In the Thick of the Woods: Contemporary Obscurity in the RSC’s 2021 Virtual Dream

Abstract: This essay discusses the Royal Shakespeare Company’s virtual Dream that was streamed in March 2021, reaching over 53,000 people from more than seventy countries. Led by publicity to expect a dazzling virtual spectacle, many spectators found the experience underwhelming, feeling baffled by a Puck avatar who groped around an artificial looking nighttime wood, whipped about by a storm. This article suggests that, instead of dismissing this project too easily, it can be read as a truly contemporary rendering of the play in Giorgio Agamben’s sense. Shakespeare becomes contemporary through a dramatic exploration of obscurity, showing how characters are compelled to act, to make decisions, and to abandon themselves to a potentially dangerous environment that they do not fully understand or control. Like Shakespeare’s mechanicals, tripped up in their rehearsal process by the strange workings in the woods near Athens, the RSC’s Dream cast were groping towards an expression of their present predicament, sending out a flickering message from their COVID-19 lockdown. The production captured contemporary obscurity and anxiety caused by the challenges of climate change, the pandemic, and digital transformation.

New Work In and Beyond Repertory at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe

This article explores the role of new writing within two contemporary Shakespearean institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Shakespeare’s Globe. Focusing on the 2010 premieres and subsequent touring productions of David Greig’s Dunsinane for the RSC and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn at the Globe, this article reflects on how these plays derive distinctive meanings from their repertory connection to Shakespeare. At the same time, I argue that by reconceiving accepted historical narratives and figures, these plays also challenge causal links between past and present, including the supposed lineage between Shakespeare and contemporary writers that both institutions espouse.

The Prisoner: A missing link in England’s history of electronic music

This article documents the circumstances surrounding the composition of the soundtrack to the theatrical production of Bridget Boland’s The Prisoner in 1954. Roberto Gerhard’s soundtrack to The Prisoner is likely the first piece to utilise ensemble and magnetic tape, and as such potentially the first live performance of musique concrète in England, taking place a year before Gerhard’s significantly more infamous electronic score to King Lear, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and four years prior to the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. No master recording or score has been located and details relating to the soundtrack are sparse. This paper attempts to collect available documentation relating to this production, as well as provide new insights relating to potential draft materials stored in the Roberto Gerhard Tape Archive and a previously unknown connection between the production and Pierre Henry and the Groupe de Reserches de Musique Concrète.

Dream by the Royal Shakespeare Company: a dystopian experience of live performance, between avatars and virtual reality

If, by definition, the performing event could not do without the co-presence in space and time of spectators and actors (Brook 21), history has shown us how profound reflections on the possibility of shifting the fundamental axes of theater have nevertheless come about. The increasingly substantial presence of video within performances, even if filmed in real-time, is one example that has called into question the fundamental concept of hic et nunc. The creation of performances for a single spectator has altered the anthropological binomial community/ritual in addition to the "non-human" entity of the performer, from metal theater to cyborg performance (Schrum). The Royal Shakespeare Company's new production (2021) Dream will be analyzed to discuss the particular artistic experimentation that has become widespread in the Covid era. This production, which is a technological performance watched by more than 20,000 people worldwide in just three days, brings performance and gaming technology together to explore new ways for the audience, a remote spectator, to experience live theater (Aebischer 21). As live play performances and readings continually crowd virtual platforms, theater is undergoing a radical shift from stage to screen and cyberspace. However, will these new formats survive in the post-pandemic times?

Indian Servitude(s) in Imperial London: Tanika Gupta’s The Empress

Abstract Dramatic acts of retrieving marginalised stories and of rewriting imperial history from a transnational perspective have been essential for efforts at decolonising knowledge. In The Empress (2013), Tanika Gupta explores the neglected history of Indian communities and the nexus of imperial labour and mobility in late-Victorian London through interlacing the fictional story of the Bengali ayah Rani and the Indian lascar Hari; the true story of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian munshi Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim; and the stories of Westminster’s first Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. By foregrounding the urban experiences of diverging Indian servant characters in the sense of a critical cosmopolitanism and by privileging a heterogeneous “history from below,” this article explores how The Empress presents a counterstory to notions of a Dickensian London “full of bonnets and white people” (Royal Shakespeare Company, “Emma Rice”) and a critical intervention in discourses relating to the ethical challenges inherent in the commemoration and teaching of the British Empire.

Following Puck virtually in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream experiment: Live theatre and high-tech innovations

The thirty-minute experiment titled Dream represented a collaborative effort between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Audience of the Future. It fused live performance with motion capture technology, 3D graphics, and interactive gaming techniques, and let the audience remotely guide Puck through a virtual forest. Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, it focused on Puck and the fairies. If, for online audiences, the virtual fairies moving through a digital forest suggested a video game, the eight performances were delivered live and in real time. This Dream represents a new format for Shakespeare’s performance that evolved during (rather than emerged from) the COVID-19 pandemic.

Theatre Direction of Peter Hall: Specificity of Artistic Interpretation of W. Shakespeare's Dramaturgy

The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's drama by the British theatre director Peter Hall and to develop a periodisation of his interpretive strategies in the second half of the 20th century. Research methodology. The research is based on the achievements of the domestic school of theatre studies and the principles of study and analysis of the play, in relation to the historical and cultural context, as well as in relation to the worldview and individuality of the director. The research methodology is based on the traditions of domestic theatre and art studies and modern approaches that combine the methods of related humanitarian disciplines – cultural studies, philosophy, and aesthetics. A complex theatre analysis of the features of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's plays by P. Hall determines the logic of the research: Through the identification of the director's orientation of the drama, the formation of the principles of play theatre in the director's reading of W. Shakespeare's plays, to the definition of the aesthetic foundations of Peter Hall's direction. The bibliographical method, the method of art analysis, the stylistic method, the systematic method, and the method of comparative analysis are applied. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that, for the first time, it attempts a comprehensive art analysis of the interpretive strategies of the British director Peter Hall in the context of W. Shakespeare's theatrical discourse of the second half of the 20th century (on the material of the performances “Coriolanus”, “War of the Roses”, “Henry VI”, and “Hamlet”); little-known facts from the life and work of P. Hall were introduced into domestic scientific circulation, and an art analysis of the director's most resonant performances was carried out; for the first time, the periodisation of P. Hall's work is proposed, based on the analysis of his performances from the perspective of the given theme, the study of the specifics of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's drama and the evolution of the master's philosophical and aesthetic vision. Conclusions. The figure of Peter Hall is one of the most significant in the history of British theatre of the 20th and early 20th centuries. The famous theatre director changed the situation and, in many ways, determined the direction of the development of the British theatre by creating repertory troupes based mainly on the works of W. Shakespeare. Based on the art analysis of Peter Hall's work from the perspective of the given topic, the periodisation of his interpretive strategies was developed in accordance with the specifics of the artistic interpretation of W. Shakespeare's drama and the evolution of the director's philosophical and aesthetic vision in the second half of the 20th century. The first period, 1955–1959, is characterised by high creative activity and the ease with which the young director masters the theatrical language, the system of stage thinking of the English theatre of the 1940s–1950s, develops an author's handwriting, emphasising devotion to traditions; performances are distinguished by the delicacy of the reading of W. Shakespeare's drama, aesthetic perfection and the presence of meaningful and verified innovation (for instance, “Twelfth Night”, 1958). The second period, 1959–1968, is characterised by mastering and rethinking the problematics and poetics of W. Shakespeare's drama; in the performances of the 1960s, the aesthetics of the deromantic Brechtian style of P. Hall was formed; the emphasis in productions shifts to the problem of repetition of historical patterns, to the de-aestheticization of events and historical figures; the stylistics of interpretative thought and modern theatrical vocabulary receive a new development. The third period, 1968–1970s, is characterised by the desire to preserve the theatrical tradition from excessive conceptualisation of direction; the strengthening of the importance of protecting W. Shakespeare's drama from modernist interpretations and P. Hall's desire to convey to the viewer the full content of the world's masterpieces due to an in-depth study of the classical text. The fourth period, 1980–1990, marked by the creation and development of a new style of Shakespearean productions, caused by the rethinking of approaches to the figurative translation of classical drama into stage language in accordance with the trends of postmodernism.
 Key words: Peter Hall, theatre direction, dramaturgy, W. Shakespeare, interpretive strategies, Royal Shakespeare Company.

“Impersonality” in Shakespeare’s Hamletand Its Modern Adaptation in BBC Hamlet

If one is to inherit a theatrical text to let it survive throughout time, there is a twofold task to be committed: in Roland Barthes’s terms, preserving its studium and at the same time devising its new punctum; in other words, maintaining consistency of the work without seriously ravaging it on one hand, and on the other, ingeniously appreciating the work to save it from repeated reception without any peculiar variation. In the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince Hamlet as a character with inward personality has been a punctum since the seventeenth century. However, now that such concepts as the unconscious or psychology have become so familiar a concept to the contemporary, Hamlet’s personality is hardly effective as a punctum. Alternately, the concept of impersonality in Hamlet is now new to us, hence a new punctum of the play. In this perspective, the foundational story of Hamlet is not the tragic drama itself, but rather the positionality of the prince Hamlet in Elsinore, that is, personality versus impersonality. Gregory Doran’s Hamlet (2009), produced by BBC in collaboration with Royal Shakespeare Company, provides an example of alternate reading of Hamlet by suggesting surveillance technology as the embodiment of impersonality in the play.

Local Habitations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has invited recent directors to tell particular kinds of socially progressive stories. This article uses the notion of social reparation to theorize remedial uses of Shakespeare in adaptations that give artists and audiences more moral agency. By imagining more inclusive local habitations for Dream, these socially progressive adaptations seek to remedy injustices in our times and the power asymmetries that inform Shakespeare’s play. My research indicates that place and social space feature prominently in reparative adaptations. To examine the significance of place in performances of Dream, this article analyzes the queer film Were the World Mine, the cross-cultural mime-dance production Dreamer, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s pandemic-era, interactive, digital performance. All three adaptations draw on the dynamics of their newly created localities to perform various social or artistic mediations.