A PRIM gaggle of Stratford citizens assembled outside the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre recently, waving placards denouncing what they feared would be a Bardic theme park beside the Avon.
The RSC plan should reassure them. Its plans might even consolidate Stratford’s status as the once and future centre of international Shakespeare performance.
The good news is that the outside of the RST should look more like the Art Deco building that replaced the burnt-out original in 1932. Awful accretions, such as the car park and the restaurants that stretch out over the river, will go.
And the place will no longer remind people of a grim brick fortress — provided the tower linking the renovated RST with the Swan doesn’t look as if it belongs in Alcatraz.
But it is the changes inside, notably the extension of the stage into the audience, that matter most. Artistic directors have worried that the RST is unfriendly to plays that mix the epic and intimate. When the RST and the Swan reopen, the contact between actors and audience should be more, well, Shakespearean.
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One worry. When the Swan closes, the RSC’s only Stratford theatre will be a temporary 1,000-seater, the Courtyard. What will replace the Swan for the next three years? This must be sorted out. Soon.