So, after camping in the temporary Courtyard Theatre, the RSC is to move back into its 1920s home, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, after its £112m renovation. I went round the place yesterday; and here is Jonathan Glancey's appraisal of the architecture.
It's not what you'd call flash architecturally, but it does the job; the important thing is that many of the old problems of the theatre are solved. The carpark out front is replaced by formal gardens (pretty austere now, though I imagine they will soften). You can now, for the first time, walk down a little path through the park straight to the church where Shakespeare is buried, and indeed, because of the public spaces being opened out, you can see the church from the theatre itself. The Swan and the RST now share an entrance. Many of the accretions to the facade of the theatre have been removed, meaning details such as the carved brick sculptures, each depicting a different Shakespearean scene, can be appreciated afresh. You can walk along the Avon on a lovely broad pathway without having to edge past the spillers-out from the cafe. The actors have decent new dressing rooms (some of the old ones were, said one of the project managers "frankly disgusting"). There're pretty compact, but each has a balcony overlooking the river.
I was particularly interested, though, in what it might mean for the company: for the theatre as an idea rather than the theatre as a building. The phyiscal change at the heart of all this is to the auditorium. A thrust stage has been put in, and 400 seats, those most distant from the stage, have been removed, creating a theatre that is much, much more intimate than the old RST. This kind of stage puts the players right among the audience. It's rather like a "diving board" as the company's founding director, Sir Peter Hall, disparagingly put it on Radio 4's Front Row on Monday, but it happens to be a very good description. Michael Boyd, artistic director of the RSC, is utterly passionate about this mode of staging plays, and it was road-tested at the temporary Courtyard Theatre in Stratford and indeed when the RSC inhabited the Roundhouse in London.
In my view, this has been a magnificent success, and the triumph that was the complete Shakespeare history plays, performed by an ensemble of players over a number of years with Boyd directing, is tremendous evidence of the visceral engagement between text, player and audience possible in this configuration. (I live-blogged my way through the entire Histories cycle at the Roundhouse in 2008, which was a fantastic experience.) I chatted about it to Geoff Streatfeild yesterday - he played Hal, Henry V and Somerset in the Histories - and he was fascinating on how it changes things for actors. Suddenly the work becomes much more sculptural, 3D ("kinaesthesic", as Boyd put it to me). You are out among the audience, not tucked safely back behind the proscenium arch. This can be intimidating - and as Streatfeild points out, you can actually see who is asleep in row E, and who is texting in row H, and you really, really want to get them to come with you. Equally, if you are making a speech about old men and women being killed, and virgins being raped, you'll find plenty of those sat around you (OK maybe not virgins), and you can really, as another actor put it, "eyeball" the audience. This is a theatre, done well, that is all about movement and action – about people in a space – as much as about the text. (I think this is where I and Michael Billington might have slightly different emphasis in taste - at least as far as his recent blog goes, though he is reserving judgement.) As Boyd put it to me: "Two things have happened in theatre since 1961: Pan's People and Pina Bausch." I can't wait for the possibilities of the new RST stage to be exploited yet more fully.
