The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford-upon-Avon main house—now called the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but originally built as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1932 – came out of the embers of the original theatre on the site that burnt down on March 6, 1926, just as the then-resident company was about to begin rehearsals for a new season that was being launched with a production of Coriolanus. The production went ahead despite the loss of their home, with the local cinema in Greenhill Street being pressed into service to house it.
Fast forward exactly 76 years, and last night – March 6, 2007 – the Royal Shakespeare Theatre saw the last first night for the theatre in its current form, with the opening of a new production of Coriolanus, to bring the story full circle. But this time the reinvention isn’t being precipitated by a fire, but by a planned three-year closure for what the RSC are calling a “transformation”, whose “aim is to create the best modern playhouse for Shakespeare’s works.”
There are some who say that it already exists – Shakespeare’s original playhouse, recreated at the Globe. Certainly, Peter Hall – founder of the RSC in its modern form – sees the virtue in going back to those kind of basics, with his own project the Rose of Kingston in the midst of its own building.
As Michael Billington noted in a feature in The Guardian recently, although the RST is “a Shakespearean mecca, it is one that has been vilified and attacked for most of its 75-year history.” He quotes one actor complaining of the lack of contact between the stage and the stalls (never mind the areas further away), “it is like acting from Calais to the cliffs of Dover”.
But he also quotes Peter Hall once telling him that what was surprising “is how such a supposedly rotten theatre can have created so much great work.” As with the famously problematic Olivier Theatre at the National, the space itself seems to throw down the gauntlet of its own challenges that directors either rise to or blame their failures on. As Billington concludes, “In short, Scott’s much-derided building was in itself neither good nor bad; it simply depended on the audacity with which it was used. But it strikes me as faintly ironic that one of the last Shakespeare productions to appear on this stage was Rupert Goold’s startling version of The Tempest”, he goes on, referring to the production that has just transferred to the Novello. “Here, if ever one needed it, was a justification for the picture-frame stage, in that the opening storm tableau gave way to an image of Prospero’s arctic abode and chilling vistas of polar crags. Goold, who cut his teeth at Northampton’s resplendently Victorian Theatre Royal, proved a fundamental point: that the structural shape of the stage matters infinitely less than the imaginative shape of the mind of the person using it. So, when the demolition squads move in on the RST, spare a thought for all the artists whose achievements lie buried somewhere in its fabric.”
But the re-design – which as Janet Suzman (appearing as Volumnia in the final production of Coriolanus there) tells The Guardian in a sidebar feature to Billington’s piece, is “not a bad good thing, it’s just a new thing” – is also about keeping pace with bigger changes and demands for our expectations of the theatre. Harriet Walter gets it right when she says, “The architecture can’t keep up with the changing style of acting. What is acceptable as naturalistic has been so modified by television, especially in programmes like The Office, that it becomes harder and harder to yell and be covered in blood.”
Last night, William Houston was doing both in the title role of Coriolanus, and rising to the challenge, filling the space with the force of his personality. And that’s what we remember most from nights here: actors who have taken charge of the theatre and made it their own. As Patrick Stewart – who recently did just that here with Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest – points out something significant when he says, “In the 40 years that have passed since I first went up to Stratford, fashions and tastes in performing Shakespeare have changed, so much so that nowadays the main house is regarded as ‘difficult’, and, I’m told, there are directors and actors who would rather not do their work there. But in the 1960s and the early 70s, the main house was the only place you could work, and I always found it thrilling. I like the drama of the big house and the epic nature of those wide-open spaces, and as a younger actor I liked the idea of the grand gesture. Nowadays, there is more emphasis on the need to find a naturalness of behaviour and an apparent spontaneity.”
