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ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Hello. I'm Abigail Rokison-Woodall, and I'm Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of Education at the Shakespeare Institute. Before the Royal Shakespeare Company was established

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in Stratford, the theatre here was the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and itself, it staged a number of really important productions, but I think one of the most significant seasons was in 1955 when Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh came

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to do a season at the RSC. The box office was absolutely besieged with applications for tickets. And one of the productions that they did in that season

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was Titus Andronicus directed by Peter Brook. And I think one of the things that's really important about this production is it sort of puts Titus Andronicus as a play back

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on the map. There'd been hardly any productions. There'd been something like, four productions of Titus Andronicus in the preceding 100 years.

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People just weren't very interested in the play. And this was a production that changed the way in which people thought about the play. It cut a lot--

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it cut a lot of bits of the play that Brook thought didn't work, but also, it dealt with the violence of the play in an innovative way. When Lavinia is raped and mutilated,

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she came back onto the stage, Vivian Leigh came back onto the stage, with ribbons, trailing ribbons. And people who know about Ninagawa's production of Titus Andronicus will know that that had a similar use of ribbons.

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Feels to me, with Titus, you have to decide whether to kind of go with that, to go with the kind of visceral violence, or to do something that's more presentational,

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and that's what Brook did. The RSC itself was formed when Peter Hall arrived here to take over in 1960. And he was artistic director from 1960 to 1968,

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and it really was a period of innovation. I mean, Hall was interested in innovative Shakespeare, but he was also really interested in new writing, as well.

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So he actually enabled Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz to do the Theatre of Cruelty season in London, which was political, controversial, deliberately defied the censor.

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And as part of that, Marowitz began developing what were called his Hamlet-- his Shakespeare collages, rather. Hamlet was the first one.

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And these were basically, kind of cut up versions of Shakespeare that were cut up in such a way and reassembled to make some kind of political point. And I think these were significant

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for the Royal Shakespeare Company more generally actually because part of what characterized Peter Hall's reign as artistic director was a willingness to chop the plays up, to rewrite elements,

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to cut them in such a way that made particular political points. And I suppose, one of the most well-known of these is Peter Hall and John Barton's the Wars of the Roses.

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This was 1963, and Barton rewrote or wrote an original, something like, 1,400 and something lines, and they cut a lot of the plays so it was the first-- it was the first tetralogy of Shakespeare plays.

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So the three Henry VI plays and Richard III condensed down into three plays and rewritten, but rewritten in such a way that although they were set during the Wars of the Roses,

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the rewriting really emphasized the parallels with contemporary politics, with the 1960s and this period of social and cultural kind of upheaval. So two years after Peter Hall did

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Wars of the Roses, this innovative production, he did a production of Hamlet, and this was another really innovative production. It's one that has gone down in the history of the RSC.

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It was intensely political. It made overt reference to the Cold War, although again the setting was a bit kind of Renaissance-Victorian mash up.

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And yet, David Warner, playing Hamlet, he was only 26 at the time, was described by reviewers as kind of the epitome of 1960s youth. And young people queued outside the theatre,

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they camped the night outside the theatre to see this production. And one of the things was, in terms of the references to politics and war,

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that it began with this huge cannon trained on the audience. So from the outset, there was a real sense of threat hanging over that production. In 1968, Trevor Nunn took over as artistic director

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of the RSC. And again, actually, it's another artistic directorship that is marked by innovation and innovative productions. And interestingly, part of that innovation

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comes out of restriction, as well. So there are two things particularly significant at the beginning of Nunn's artistic directorship. One is that The Other Place theatre opens.

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So a theatre that is, by its very nature, restricted in terms of size and scenery and facilities, but some really innovative, interesting work goes on there, both new writing and Shakespeare.

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But also, in the main house, the RSC was going through some financial difficulties around that time, and Trevor Nunn decided that the season in 1969 should be pared back.

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So he asked the designer to design a white box really, in which the different Shakespeare productions could be performed. And that was innovative in itself in that it was partly

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inspired by Peter Brook's book The Empty Space, which had been published in 1968. It was innovative, this idea of putting these productions into an empty space, not creating

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masses of elaborate scenery. But then, of course, it influences, in turn, Brook's own production of Midsummer Night's Dream, which has probably gone down as one of the most innovative productions

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the RSC has ever done and one of the most innovative productions of that play. And certainly, I would say, the production has influenced almost every production

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of Midsummer Night's Dream that has followed it in some way or another. Whether it's because people have wanted to emulate part of it or whether people have just been terrified to do anything

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like it and do a kind of pale imitation. So that production was done in a white box. The forest was kind of coils of metal. The fairies were dressed as Chinese acrobats.

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And I guess what Brook was doing was trying to find a kind of analogy, a modern analogy, for the magic of the play. Now, audiences in the 1970s might not

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have been so inclined to believe in fairies, but he used circus skills to capture the sort of sense of magic. And the other thing that's really

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innovative about that production is that it's one of the first productions that really sees the fairy world as a kind of mirror image of the mortal world, a kind of dream version.

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And that means that Hippolyta and Titania end up being doubled and Theseus and Oberon. And again, that's now something really common in productions of Midsummer Night's Dream,

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but it was something that Brook's production definitely influenced. The Other Place theatre opened in 1974 as part of Trevor Nunn's artistic directorship.

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And in 1976, Nunn did a production of Macbeth there, which is another production marked by innovation, another production that's really gone down in the history of the RSC.

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And, of course, it was filmed for television, and as a result, we still have it. So it's one of those productions that has really endured. It starred Ian McKellen as Macbeth and Judi Dench

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as Lady Macbeth. It was in this tiny space, so the sort of sense of claustrophobia and threat, I think, was really palpable.

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The performance space was a circle in the middle, and the audience and members of the cast sat around the sort of edges of this magic circle. And, I guess, one of the other innovative things

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about the production was that Judi Dench's Lady Macbeth managed to capture the sort of tender and loving side of Lady Macbeth, rather than simply making her into some kind of demoness or villain.

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In 1978, Terry Hands joined Trevor Nunn so they became joint artistic directors for a period of time. And one of the most celebrated productions of that era and I think innovative--

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innovative to a degree was Nicholas Nickleby. It was an adaptation by David Edgar, and it was over eight hours in length. It was done over two performances

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so you could see it on consecutive nights, or you could, I think, some days you could see a matinee and an evening performance. And they did it in London at the Aldwych Theatre,

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and they transformed the theatre. They transformed it so the storytelling was all around the audience. And it had a huge cast, and the cast

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played all of the characters, and they were the storytellers. And it was incredibly successful. There's some story about, I can't remember who it was, somebody writing a spoof article saying that the Royal

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Shakespeare Company was going to be renamed the Royal Dickens Company because this production had been so incredibly successful. So in 1986, towards the end of the joint Terry Hands-Trevor

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Nunn period as artistic directors, another theatre space opened in Stratford, and that was The Swan Theatre. The Swan Theatre has a footprint like an Elizabethan courtyard

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theatre. And it's intimate, it wasn't anything like as intimate as The Other Place, but it was much more intimate than the main house.

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And it became for many, many actors, their favourite place to perform. And I think that there was less obvious innovation going on by this time.

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There was nothing like kind of Brook's Dream or Hall's Hamlet or Wars of the Roses, but what there was, and there were two really significant productions in The Swan,

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I think, that showed this, was actually innovation in terms of relying on the Shakespearean text. Actually going back and saying, we trust these plays. These plays are good, and if we don't put too many concepts

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onto them and if we just cast them really well and we actually use most of the text, then we will have some really good productions. And I, think I, mean Deborah Warner's production

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of Titus Andronicus in 1987 is a brilliant example of this with Brian Cox as Titus. It was violent, it was shocking, and it used most of the text. Quite unlike Peter Brook's production in 1955

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that had cut a lot of the text, it actually decided to rely on the fact that Shakespeare had written a play that worked. So yeah, Deborah Warner's production

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didn't shy away from some of the more horrible aspects of the play, and yet, at the same time, found a kind of dark comedy in the play, particularly in the play's ending.

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Another production in The Swan was Sam Mendes' production of Troilus and Cressida in 1990. Again, a play that's not often performed now. And yeah, I mean, again a wonderful cast of actors.

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I mean, people still talk about Simon Russell Beale's Thersites as being a really extraordinary and brave and unfeigned sort of performance. And again, it was about this dark play,

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but finding in it, a kind of black comedy, I think, that kind of characterized it maybe a bit like Warner's Titus. So Adrian Noble took over as artistic director of the RSC

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in 1991, and his regime was interestingly, kind of bounded on both sides by the history plays. The history plays are fascinating in that most artistic directors of the RSC end up or have ended up doing

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a number of the history plays. Some kind of cycle maybe not the whole thing, but kind of condensed versions of it. And it's interesting that as Gregory Doran gets

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to the end of doing all of the plays in the first folio, he will finish with the Henry VI plays, which will kind of complete his history's cycle, as it were. So when Adrian Noble came as artistic director,

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he'd already directed The Plantagenets for the RSC, which was Henry VI parts I, II, and III, and Richard III. And he began his regime by directing Henry IV Parts

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I and II. And these weren't hugely innovative in their setting or staging, they didn't do something kind of bizarre and strange with the plays,

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but they were highly theatrical. And what really marked them out, I think, as innovative was some fresh readings of the characters. So Robert Stephen's Falstaff, this really nuanced Falstaff,

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we saw all aspects of Falstaff's character. Julian Glover's Henry IV, which Henry IV, that, again, we saw the kind of humanity in that character, and I think that was really what marked out the production.

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And I think, I remember when Michael Billington was asked to name his favourite Henry IV's, not actually that long ago, he went back to those productions of Adrian Noble's. Following Adrian Noble's artistic directorship,

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Michael Boyd took over as artistic director. And Michael Boyd had already directed the Henry VI plays for the RSC by the time he took over, and he revived them later on sort

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of towards the end of his regime as artistic director. I think Michael Boyd's time was marked by quite a lot of innovation, some of it behind the scenes, some of it in the way in which actors were trained

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and the way in which rehearsals worked and so forth. In 2003, Gregory Doran, who was later to become artistic director, directed a production of The Tamer Tamed, and he directed it as a double bill

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with The Taming of the Shrew. And the thing about The Tamer Tamed is that it's a play that is written over 10 years after The Taming of the Shrew by John Fletcher,

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and it seems to be a deliberate sequel to The Taming of the Shrew. And in The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio has tamed Kate in a way that is quite brutal and quite uncomfortable

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and quite difficult now for some of us to sort of enjoy and see as a comedy in the theatre. And in The Tamer Tamed, Kate has died, and Petruchio has remarried, and his wife is basically,

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taming him, for want of a better phrase. She refuses to do what he says, and she refuses to sleep with him. She refuses to let him into the bedroom

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until he does what she wants. So it's a sort of slight revenge play. And I suppose what it means and what it arguably enabled the RSC to do, and I think

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Gregory Doran said this himself, he didn't have to solve The Taming of the Shrew. There's a sense now, what do you do with The Taming of the Shrew in order to make it palatable?

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I mean, there had been plenty of productions where Kate's last speech has been kind of nod, nod, wink, wink, I don't mean any of this really, which I don't think quite solves the play.

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And actually, to just accept that this man does something pretty horrible in this play, and that whilst, by the end of the play, Kate may be tamed, actually we don't have to approve of Petruchio's methods

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at all. And by having The Tamer Tamed, this sort of revenge play that comes afterwards, it does enable you just to play The Taming of the Shrew sort of at face value.

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Another real innovation of Michael Boyd's artistic directorship was the long ensembles. So Michael Boyd, there was the histories ensemble that did all of the histories plays between 2006 and 2008.

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And then, there was what became known as the long ensemble. So between 2009 and 2012, the long ensemble did a series of plays with the same actors over the three-year period.

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In between that, there were a number of other quite long ensemble companies who did a number of shows, and embedded within that, then it allowed for productions with slightly shorter runs

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and also for established, even star actors, to come and do something. You wouldn't get, well, you might, but it would be difficult to get an actor like David

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Tennant or Patrick Stewart to come and do a three-year ensemble at the RSC, but you could get someone to come and do a short run of one or two plays.

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So David Tennant came to the RSC to play Hamlet in 2008, and I guess, what really marked out this production was that David Tennant was at the height of his fame as Doctor Who.

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And I think, unashamedly, the production capitalized to an extent on that. So he was a beanie, parka-wearing Hamlet with Converse trainers, and I seem

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to remember that Tennant's Doctor Who wore Converse trainers, as well. So there was sort of nods to that. And what it did was it brought, arguably, a new and maybe

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younger audience to Stratford and to Shakespeare. The production transferred to London and somehow broke-- I can't remember whether it broke the internet or just the RSC's box office, but so many people tried to book

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in such a short period of time. I think the whole thing managed to sell out in less than a day, the whole of the London run. So it really was--

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it was a production that was hugely successful and hugely attractive to a young audience. So another milestone of Michael Boyd's artistic directorship was the World Shakespeare Festival.

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The World Shakespeare Festival was a part of the wider cultural Olympiad that obviously accompanied London having the Olympics in 2012. And the RSC and other companies that came to the RSC

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to essentially stage numerous productions and adaptations of Shakespeare, and one of those productions was Iqbal Khan's production of Much Ado About Nothing, and it was set in modern day India.

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I mean, the RSC came in for a tiny bit of criticism around that time for the fact that it took the cultural Olympiad for there to be an all-Asian production of Much Ado About Nothing

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and an all Black production of Julius Caesar, but this was a kind of landmark year in terms of the level of cultural diversity in casting at the RSC.

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And the production was able to draw some parallels between gender and gender politics, cultural politics in Renaissance England or indeed, Renaissance Sicily and modern day Delhi.

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And it was the first time that an actress of Asian origin had played Beatrice on the stage at the RSC, and that actress was Meera Syal playing Beatrice.