The Stage

RSC reveals three-year Russian-themed ensemble project

Published Monday 22 September 2008 at 14:50 by Alistair Smith

Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd has unveiled his next three-year ensemble project with a programme of plays investigating Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union.

The RSC’s work over the next three years will include a strand called Other Russia, which will feature revivals of Russian classics, contemporary Russian work and modern British writing about the region.

“We’ve chosen to focus our attention on Russia,” explained Boyd, who himself has previously worked in the country. “Russia still - as always - sits astride, like a giant, the East/West divide between dominantly Christian western Europe and the East. They face the West on one hand and Islam on the other. They are now a crucial supplier of energy to western Europe and they’ve had an enormous renaissance with their political and military influence on the world… The ghosts of the cold war have been re-conjured - is that legitimate or appropriate?”

In 2009, the strand will feature two new works by Russian writers - The Grain Store by Natal’ia Vorozhbit, set against the backdrop of the thirties Ukrainian famine, and The Drunks by Mikhail and Vyacheslav Durnenkov, which tells the story of a soldier returning from the war in Chechnya as a reluctant hero.

In 2011, the RSC will stage two works from British theatre-makers with Little Eagles by Rona Munro, telling the story of the sixties space race from the Sputnik team’s point of view, and Silence - a collaboration between RSC associate director David Farr and experimental theatre group Filter, which will follow a “disenchanted British journalist travelling to Moscow to meet a controversial theatre-maker”.

Boyd said that he expected the strand to culminate in 2012 with a major Russian Shakespeare production transferring to the UK, as part of the RSC’s World Shakespeare Festival for the Cultural Olympiad.

Prior to then, Gregory Doran will direct Boris Godunov by Aleksandr Pushkin, Boyd will direct Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and the RSC is also looking to work on a stage version of Chekhov’s short stories and the work of Michael Bulgakov.

Meanwhile, the company will also stage a number of classic non-Russian works.

Boyd will direct As You Like It in 2009 and Antony and Cleopatra in 2010, in which Kathryn Hunter as Cleopatra. Farr will direct The Winter’s Tale and King Lear in 2009 and 2010, Rupert Goold - in his first show as an RSC associate director - will direct Romeo and Juliet in 2010, and Lucy Bailey will stage Julius Caesar in 2009. Meanwhile, Gregory Doran will direct a new stage adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century Arthurian epic Le Morte D’Arthur, written by Mike Poulton.

The RSC will also stage A Tender Thing, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet by Ben Power which shifts the action to an elderly couple, and Paul Hunter will direct a shortened version of The Comedy of Errors for younger audiences.

The casts for all these productions will be drawn from a 44-strong ensemble of actors, who have been signed up to 30-month contracts with the RSC. It will be this ensemble - which continues the ethos launched by Boyd with the recent three-year Histories project - that will reopen the RSC’s rebuilt Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 2010, although Boyd has not confirmed with which production.

He added: “The other thing we are bringing to this long company are the lessons learned from the Histories company. We’ve learnt to give the actors just a little more breathing space. We worked nearly too hard on the Histories and by just increasing the size of the company in a manageable way from 34 to 44, we can at times divide ourselves in two, thus giving half the company a night off or a bit of gentle rehearsal.”

Boyd also said that the new ensemble principle would inform all aspects of the RSC’s work. This will include increased developmental work and training “to create a protective umbrella underneath the repertoire of Shakespeare for genuine experiment, genuine development, genuine testing work out which will not always be hugely commercial but will be where Peter Hall wanted the company to be in 1961, which is a developmental company, as opposed to just a kind of Harvey Nichols of all that was best in British theatre.”