LONDON
Adrian Noble, artistic director of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, has announced another radical restructure of the company that will see it depart its London base, the Barbican Centre, next May.
Noble comments, "The RSC will adopt a more flexible model for its operations in London, moving center stage with more plays in a wider range of venues, more premieres, and an important presence in the West End. We will have more first nights. All that is attractive to actors as well as audiences."
The RSC has occupied the main house Barbican Theatre and the studio Pit Theatre since the venue opened, to the RSC's specifications, in 1982. In 1985, the RSC's co-production of "Les Miserables" with Cameron Mackintosh was launched at the Barbican Theatre, before transferring to the West End's Palace Theatre where it has run ever since and continues to provide the company with valuable revenue. However, the RSC has long expressed dissatisfaction with the Barbican, and four years ago, it reduced its year-round residency to a six month one only that runs from November to April.
The Barbican's management immediately plugged the gap, launching the highly successful, now annual, BITE (Barbican International Theatre Event). Under the artistic directorship of Graham Sheffield, the program embraces world theatre, dance, and music events, and two dance productions featured as part of the festival last year took Olivier Awards. This year's season, currently running through October, includes Robert Wilson directing a Swedish production of Strindberg's "A Dream Play"; Anne Bogart's play about Robert Wilson entitled "Bob"; Theatre de Complicite (whose production of "Mnemonic" recently played Off-Broadway) in "The Noise of Time," presented by BITE in a co-production with Lincoln Center and English National Opera; and American Repertory Theatre's production of Gozzi's "The King Stag," directed by Andrei Serban with costumes, masks, puppets, and movement by Julie Taymor. Sheffield has commented on the RSC's latest move by saying, "I look forward to a new relationship with the RSC and to collaborating with them to maximize the freedom, flexibility, and quality of the programming in the Barbican Theatre."
The door is therefore open for the RSC to continue appearing at the Barbican, but the venue will now be just one of many that it will consider for its London showings. Saying that the RSC will now "pick the theatre to suit the play," Noble adds, "We want to put on Shakespeare in the heart of the West End. We want to produce great new plays, not just in small studio spaces, but in larger venues where more people can see them."
The RSC intends that the restructure will free the company up from its current transfer cycle that sees productions launched at its Stratford-upon-Avon base in rural Warwickshire before moving on to a London run at the Barbican. This forces the RSC to commit its actors to a comparatively lengthy stay with the company. Instead, they hope to be able to attract international stars, American actors, and other high caliber actors who previously couldn't afford the time commitment to do more limited runs and one-off shows. Already, Ralph Fiennes has agreed to play the title role of Ibsen's "Brand" in a limited West End run for the RSC, and Kenneth Branagh has agreed to return to the company, too, for whom he last played Hamlet in 1992.
At the same time, the RSC also intends to act as a training ground for emerging actors, and will establish an academy of young actors, made up of around 16 leading drama school graduates and to be run by Declan Donnellan, at Stratford-upon-Avon's Other Place Theatre.
The plans, which are expected to lead to numerous stage and theatre staff redundancies in London and also some streamlining of staff at Stratford, have been attacked by the theatre unions here as "cultural vandalism." BECTU's (the United Kingdom's Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph, and Theatre Union) Gerry Morrisey has commented, "The RSC's proposal to desert the Barbican and to scale down their summer touring and ensemble works threatens the artistic integrity of the company, will weaken the capital's cultural credibility, and threatens the tourism industry."
The news comes at a time when the RSC's commercial transfer of a revised version of the Broadway musical "The Secret Garden" has just flopped in the West End, ironically hosted at its former longtime home, the Aldwych, which it occupied for some 20 years before it moved to the Barbican. Meanwhile, its former studio home, the Donmar Warehouse, has of course become one of the leading venues in the capital.