RSC seeks greater involvement with amateur theatre

Published Tuesday 23 September 2008 at 16:45 by Alistair Smith

Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd has called on theatre professionals to take amateur performance more seriously, and revealed that the RSC is looking to increase the amount of work it undertakes with non-professionals.

Speaking as he unveiled the company’s plans for the next three years and beyond, Boyd said that by 2012, when the RSC will stage a World Shakespeare Festival as part of the Cultural Olympiad, he wanted to “take away the crucifix and garlic that we have held up in the profession against the non-professional theatre movement in this country.”

He added: “Amateur theatre in Britain is probably one of the most powerful cultural phenomenon the world over and it has not really been treated with a great deal of respect. There has historically been, I think, a tragic split between doing theatre as a community and a group of specialists - professionals - who do it for a living.

“One of the most interesting objectives of the World Shakespeare Festival is to try to renegotiate that definition between professional and non-professional. And to go back to that work that inspired Shakespeare - say the Mystery Plays where maybe only Herod or Jesus would have been paid some money and everyone else would have been part of the community. There is a danger in our modern, professionalised theatre that we get rather good at what we do, but we get disconnected from the community we are doing it for.”

He added that as part of the Cultural Olympiad, he wanted to see major festivals of amateur productions of Shakespeare in Newcastle, Stratford and London and said that the RSC wanted to expand on the work it already undertakes with non-professionals, whereby they are invited to perform at the company’s open air space in Stratford during the summer.