The Leasing-Out of the RSC

In the summer of 2001, as American friends and colleagues came to Stratford-upon-Avon where I have a summer home, they would ask, "what's wrong at the Royal Shakespeare Company?" "Why is the RSC leaving the Barbican?" "Why is the Other Place closing?" "What is broken?" I couldn't answer the barrage of questions, because the new plans, suddenly announced on 25 May 2001, by Adrian Noble, then artistic director for the RSC, simply didn't make sense to me. And some thirteen months later (as I write this article in July 2002), they still don't. After a year that has seen coverage both approving and disapproving in Britain's national papers, the first serious strike threat at the company (averted at the last moment), calls for Noble's resignation, and, in April 2002, the announcement of that resignation, the questions are still insistent and unanswered. I write as a teacher of Shakespeare, as a student of performance history, as a resident of Stratford, but mostly as someone who is witnessing what looks like the self-destruction of the professional repertory company that has been responsible for many of my most exciting and stimulating evenings in the theater. And I also write to raise questions for colleagues, since the RSC has made touring in North America, and especially to university/college campuses, one of its stated goals as well as one of its hoped-for sources of funding. The situation is a complicated one—and one about which reasonable people can disagree. What follows is my personal perspective on interrelated topics—the RSC's structure, its Stratford base, and its London performance venues—as gleaned from publicly available sources (newspapers, press releases, television broadcasts) and occasionally from conversations.

The 25 May announcement took many people by surprise, including most of the RSC's fifty-two governors, who were informed but not consulted; the Board, the inner circle of sixteen governors, had endorsed a decision that seems to have been made primarily by Adrian Noble. Opposing viewpoints within the company or among the governors were not made public, although in October 2001, Terry Hands, the previous artistic director, resigned from his position as one of the advisory directors, saying that he did not see "how these plans could be financially or artistically viable." ¹ Basically the plan, which came to be known as Project Fleet, "designed to make the RSC more agile, more flexible and less institutional," announced widespread changes:

the change from a large single company that created a season of plays beginning in Stratford, transferring later to London, to a series of smaller companies, some with cross-casting, but some without; shorter contracts for actors and, it was promised, more attractive pay and working conditions for actors; redevelopment of the Stratford base with "the creation of more flexible performance spaces and improved facilities for visitors" and which later expanded into ideas for a "theatre village"; the change from a single London base, the Barbican Centre, to a range of different London performance venues; more focus on touring, both in the UK and particularly in the United States; and the creation of an academy to train classical actors, involving both classes and production. ²

Hidden in the details were disquieting issues. Only a very close reading of the 2001 press release which I've summarized and from which the quotations above are taken might reveal that the Other Place, the RSC's smallest and most flexible theater, would close; originally a quonset hut and the site of major Shakespeare performances and of the first performances of a host of new plays, the rebuilt facility would now become the home of the Academy. While indicating that the RSC employed about eighty-five staff in London, who would, presumably, all lose their jobs, and suggesting that "job losses of between 50-60" were anticipated at Stratford, the press release was silent on the fact that none of these people had had any...