The actual viewing experience in the
redesigned Royal Shakespeare Theatre was never going to be much of a
surprise. We had known almost from the beginning that the new RST would
be based upon the Courtyard Theatre, its interim replacement: the same
thrust stage, slightly larger capacity (at 1040 seats), improved
acoustics, but basically a “fair copy” of the Courtyard. It is the
touches around the rest of the building that add a signature. I don’t
mean the panoramic viewing tower for tourists (separate admission
charge) or the swish new bars and restaurants, but the way in which the
building’s history has been visibly preserved.
As
you walk towards the RST through the foyer space that now unites it and
the Swan Theatre, you pass a plaque marking the site of the original
control desk and a pair of huge doors to the former wing space. A
curved curtain wall to the new auditorium runs inside the old, bare
brick back wall. In a delightfully surrealistic touch, halfway up the
back wall of the third floor restaurant are three theatre seats: they
are in the position of the furthest seats from the stage in the old
configuration, a maximum distance which has now almost been halved from
27 to 15 metres. Future generations will be spared the impression
I had on my first school visit to the RST, of being seated in a
neighbouring county to the action onstage.
The
biggest disappointment, frankly, is that the new space should be
unveiled for two productions which have already been reviewed twice, in
the Courtyard a year or so ago and then at London’s Roundhouse in
December. I still fail to grasp why both David Farr’s
King Lear and Rupert Goold’s
Romeo And Juliet
adopt a mix-and-match historical attitude to costuming, but in general
their excesses have been curbed. Goold’s production, in particular,
seems now more of a piece in terms of the director’s characteristic
novelties, rather than proceeding from a relatively straight start to
an increasingly jazzed-up climax just as jazzing-up becomes ever more
counter-productive to the play. Mariah Gale’s Juliet makes a journey
not from childhood to maturity, but from youthful innocence to a
still-youthful surfeit of experience. Jonjo O’Neill’s irrepressibly
obscene Mercutio remains the highlight, as in
Lear
the strongest performance is Darrell D’Silva’s bluff but unostentatious
Kent. The real baptism will come with the first new production in the
space, RSC artistic director Michael Boyd’s
Macbeth in late April.
Written for the Financial
Times.