The Royal Shakespeare Company is attempting to attract new audiences by offering 25,000 tickets at £25 as the theatre’s new artistic directors aim to “throw open the doors” to a more diverse crowd.
The RSC’s first joint artistic directors in four decades, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, announced an inaugural season packed with politically tinged plays as they try to reinvigorate the former home of the bard.
They said: “With this, our first season, we want to throw open the doors in every sense, collaborating with artists from across the globe on all our stages, and ensuring we can welcome as many people as possible with a brand new ticketing initiative.”
The pair were billed as the people to “shake up” Shakespeare when they were appointed in September 2022. They are bringing an adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s the Buddha of Suburbia to the stage alongside Kyoto, set around the Japanese climate agreement of 1997, David Edgar’s the New Real, which looks at political campaigning, and the European premiere of the Iranian play English.
While their joint appointment was celebrated by many, including Sam Mendes, the Guardian’s Michael Billington said they faced a tough challenge. He wrote that the RSC was “an institution in need of redefinition”, which had to deal with the fallout from “Covid, the metropolitan bias of British culture and the marginalisation of Shakespeare”.
The pair pushed back against the idea that the RSC was no longer part of the cultural conversation, pointing to the recent success of the Studio Ghibli adaptation My Neighbour Totoro. Harvey said under the pair not every play needed to be set in 2024 but productions did need “to be in the conversation of our times”.
When asked how the Kureishi adaptation sat next to the bard’s canon, Evans said the idea was that during their tenure “everything is on the table”, with Harvey adding that their non-Shakespearean offer needed to have “big lungs” and deal with complex conversations.
Evans and Harvey’s first season features seven Shakespeare plays, with four comedies – including Love’s Labour’s Lost, Twelfth Night, the Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It. There will also be a production of King Lear performed by the Ukrainian Uzhhorod theatre company, a ballet performance of Romeo and Juliet and a Rupert Goold-directed Hamlet.
Harvey and Evans will take the helm during the season, with Evans performing the lead in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Harvey directing the Harry Potter star Alfred Enoch, who leads her version of Pericles.
“The timeless, protean nature of Shakespeare’s writing offers an exciting canvas for artists – and we’re excited to be renewing collaborations with so many of them,” they said. “This season marks the beginning of a new era for the RSC”.
The ticketing plan will be on offer for the entire season and sit alongside the existing TikTok £10 scheme for 14- to 25-year-olds.
When Evans and Harvey took over from the outgoing artistic director Gregory Doran in June 2023, they became the first co-artistic directors of the company since Terry Hands and Trevor Nunn were installed in 1978.
* This piece was amended on 17 January 2023 to correct the title of David Edgar’s new play