Builders have moved into the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. Up the road, the RST's temporary replacement, the Courtyard Theatre, has been running for more than a year. One has to admire the RSC's handling of the transitional period. The Courtyard was built in time for the Complete Works Festival (2006). It allows the RSC to continue to deliver a full programme during the closure and acts as a testing ground for the new RST. If Michael Boyd meant it when he said the Courtyard was a prototype, I wonder whether the design of the new theatre has been revised in light of the experiences of the last year. For in my view the Courtyard has revealed that barn-sized Jacobean-style theatres don't work.
Small galleried playhouses like the Swan encourage an intimate, conversational style of acting. But a main house theatre demands something more—images, atmosphere, and stagecraft. The playing area should be transformable. Courtyard-style theatres with their redundant high spaces and ranks of distracting spectators in every direction are clearly limiting in this respect. How many more times can Michael Boyd bring the actors down from above on ropes and trapezes? Perhaps most worrying of all, directors know that if they use any part of the stage other than a narrow section about a third of the way down from the rear wall, a large percentage of the audience will be watching the backs of the actors' heads.
It's true that proscenium theatres like the old RST are unforgiving to all but the most talented directors and actors, and I wonder whether the RSC isn't simply admitting defeat. I'm not aware of any major theatre in France or Germany bringing down the curtain on the proscenium, but in the era of New Labour our theatre culture is always looking for the new trend, the new buzz word and the easiest option. During the last public event in the RST, Trevor Nunn, Terry Hands and Adrian Noble spoke eloquently of the theatre's importance, with Nunn explaining how Peter Hall and John Bury's decision to extend a raked stage through and beyond the proscenium created a unique RSC style. Michael Boyd, for his part, was unapologetic, dismissing the doubters with the words, 'People who want to sit in the dark can go to the cinema'. Well, it's true, there is a world elsewhere... and the current development looks too much like a compromise to be regarded by future generations as the end of the story.
Simon Trowbridge, December 2007
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