The Stage

Amateurs to get first taste of £113m RST

Published Wednesday 1 September 2010 at 14:26 by Alistair Smith

Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd has revealed the reopening programme for the company’s transformed £112.8 million Stratford-upon-Avon home, with an increased focus on amateur theatre.

Boyd described the new venue, which features a re-imagined 1,000-seat main auditorium with a thrust stage and a revamped Swan Theatre, as a “miraculous marriage of the ambitious, the large scale, the epic and the intimate”.

He added that he wanted to use its opening to put amateur theatre “centre stage” and help overcome the “crucifix and garlic” attitude between professional and amateur sectors.

“As part of a programme of work between now and 2012 with the World Shakespeare Festival, we are very interested in trying to renegotiate the relationship between amateur theatre and professional theatre in this country. We’re sticking the amateurs centre stage with our opening - with an open house night of local amateur performers, with another night where there’s amateur choirs from across the UK, as well as a major thing from school kids.”

He added: “There’s been a sort of crucifix and garlic mutual relationship between the amateur sector and the professional sector for too long. It’s been fine for professionals to work in ‘community theatre’, that’s been kosher, but to actually acknowledge that quite a substantial proportion of people working in professional theatre started out in local amateur groups, that is a well kept secret.

“People pretend they know nothing about it, but it is the case. I think there is something about the relationship that an amateur theatre has with its audience that we in the professional theatre can learn from, and there are obviously skills that we can share.”

The redeveloped RST and Swan theatres will open on November 24 with a four-month programme of preview events and activities around the building. These will include the amateur activities and exhibitions, as well as tours around the building and events such as My RSC Gallery - where boxes of art created by audiences are embedded into the walls of the new venue - or an ‘interactive insult throne’, where audiences can sit and have Shakespearean insults thrown at them.

Full productions on the RST stage will begin in February 2011, when the current ensemble’s King Lear and Romeo and Juliet are transferred into the venue.

Meanwhile, The Swan’s reopening programme will include a new puppet version of The Tempest created by Little Angel Theatre, a sung interpretation of The Rape of Lucrece by Camille O’Sullivan and Love is My Sin, an interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets by Peter Brook. Barrie Rutter and Roger Rees will also perform their one-man shows about Shakespeare in the Swan.

Boyd said that the preview programme across the two spaces, which also includes a concert performance by O’Sullivan and work by Geraldine Pilgrim, would see the company “reaching out consciously for new audiences”.

The first brand new Shakespeare productions to be staged will not be until April 2011 and are yet to be announced.

RSC executive director Vikki Heywood added that the new building would be more expensive to run than the old venue, but stressed that there would be extra income streams, with the RSC taking its catering operation in-house.

The company will soon be recruiting for around 70 staff to work in the new Swan, as well as the bars and restaurant, which means that staffing levels will be above those before the RST shut.

She said: “The opening year of any building is always the most complicated to budget, because you’ve got a lot of costs in there that you don’t know what they are going to be. The building will be more expensive to run than the old building. It was a thirties building and although we have minimised running costs, you can’t take a thirties building and turn it into a 2010 building with WiFi and all the other things that are absolutely expected and for it not to be more expensive to run. But we will have more income streams.

“We have created a new rooftop restaurant and we have more public spaces for bars and cafes.”

The RSC still has £5 million left to secure to meet the total cost of the project and fundraising will continue for another five months.

So far, donations have come from 13,000 people in 55 countries. Ticket prices at the reopened RST will have increased in line with inflation - from £52 for top price tickets to £56 in the new theatre. A simplified pricing structure will be employed and Heywood stressed that the RSC would keep its discounted £5 ticket offer for 16 to 25 year olds.