RSC Shakespeare: The Director's Cut

Since its origin in the early 1960s, the Royal Shakespeare Company has staged landmark productions of nearly all Shakespeare's plays. From John Barton's Wars of the Roses and Peter Hall's 'student' Hamlet, through Peter Brook's era-defining Midsummer Night's Dream to Trevor Nunn's sequence of tragedy collaborations with Ian McKellen (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear) to Deborah Warner's recuperation of Titus Andronicus and Michael Boyd's reanimation of the Henry VI plays, this has been above all a director's theatre. Paradoxically, though, the existing record of RSC performance history offers much more from the actor's and the critic's points of view than from the director's. There is no directorial equivalent to the excellent series of volumes of published interviews with actors, Players of Shakespeare. This is the gap that this will research will begin to fill. Brook, Hall and Barton are now near the end of their extraordinary careers: their voices need to be preserved before it is too late. Even the generation of Nunn and Hands are approaching retirement age. A key younger generation of directors, notably Warner and Mendes, have moved away from the RSC but are willing to talk to me about their landmark productions. And the existing regime of Boyd and Doran is fully committed to the notion of research as an essential aspect of the life of the Company. Gregory Doran in particular has an extremely acute sense of the nuances of Shakespearean text, and copious notes deriving from his direction of almost half the canon.

As an RSC Board member and editor of the RSC Shakespeare Complete Works project, I have unique access to all these directors. The research will involve interviewing them about the chosen productions, publishing edited versions of the interviews and reflecting critically upon this body of evidence in relation to other forms of performance archive such as video recordings, annotated promptbooks and the analyses of critics.