Now here is a theatre fit to do Shakespeare proud. When the RSC first tentatively reopened the doors of its base camp last November after three years and £112.8 million of work, its artistic director, Michael Boyd, declared that they were aiming for “a miraculous marriage of the epic and the intimate”. And after seeing the pair of shows that the theatre finally opened with yesterday, I’ve got this to say: miracles can happen.
The intimacy is the key. The old RST could do epic all right. But though the new theatre can hold more than a thousand people, none of them is more than about 50ft away. Before, in the balcony, you could be almost twice as far away as that. As I know from personal experience. My first evening of Shakespeare was here, on a school trip in 1984. We were seeing Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. The show that made his name. Or so I hear. All I can remember was how far away it all seemed. I didn’t go back for years.
But this new space is a very different, very superior proposition, wherever you’re sitting. If you went to the temporary Courtyard venue or saw the RSC’s recent season at the Roundhouse in London, you’ll know the shape and the feel. This gives more: the audience even closer to the action, with surer acoustics, an Elizabethan look but a modern feel. As the cast of David Farr’s King Lear walked on to the thrust stage, watched on three sides by an audience on three levels, I felt not that I was watching a court scene but that I was in one.
These are shows that have played in Stratford and London. And Jon Bausor’s Lear design suggests that, when the RSC’s 50th birthday season begins next month with Macbeth, this space could really take us places. His look is epic but knackered. Walls crack apart. Lights sizzle. “We have seen the best of our times,” says Geoffrey Freshwater’s Gloucester, and you feel it. The characters confide with us or with each other with equal ease. No one has to shout.
It’s a fascinating production, the most approachable Lear I’ve seen. Greg Hicks isn’t mighty like a Jacobi or a McKellen, but he’s vigorously decrepit. His fast slide from alpha male to clutching his pants, matter-of-factly mad, has a surprising tenderness.
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Rupert Goold’s Romeo and Juliet is even better. Exhilarating, playful but heartfelt too. He uses every corner of the theatre, so the first half’s pyrotechnics and jocularity hit you square in the face. But so does the erotic rapture between our doomed heroes, Sam Troughton and Mariah Gale, caught in star-cross’d Vegas spotlights when they first meet at the rave-like masque. The 3½ hours race by. The epic and the intimate? Job done.
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