I’ve returned home from my Shakespeare week, a five-day adventure in Stratford-upon-Avon, seeing four Shakespeare plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was a very interesting week, with four great performances, and meetings with the renowned Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells, and two actors from the current RSC productions, Pippa Nixon and Alex Waldmann. (I’ll be posting a review of the fourth play I saw, All’s Well that Ends Well, along with interviews with Stanley Wells and Pippa Nixon and Alex Waldmann soon.)
It was an interesting week. Stratford-upon-Avon is a lovely little town, and I stayed at the Arden Hotel, which is right across the street from the RSC. The area around the RSC is delightful, with riverside gardens, and more swans and ducks than you can imagine. Here’s a picture from the RSC’s riverside café:
The RSC has two theaters: the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which seats 1,040 people, and the Swan Theatre, which seats 460. The first play I saw, Titus Andronicus was in the Swan, and the other three were in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. While the latter theater is twice the size of the Swan, you don’t really notice, since they both have thrust stages, with the audience on three sides of the stage. No matter where you sit, you are very close to the action.
This was a tiring week, though. With four long plays – from 2:45 for Titus Andronicus to 3:35 for Hamlet (intermissions included) – these are long evenings of sustained attention. While I’m familiar with Shakespeare’s language, I still need to pay more attention than with, say, a movie or TV series, and four plays in four days proved to be taxing. But these were four excellent productions, and I’d especially like to see Hamlet again.
So, stay tuned for more about my Shakespeare week. I’ll post a review of All’s Well that Ends Well soon, and I’ll post interviews next week.
It’s worth noting, for those too far from Stratford, that three of the current RSC productions will be touring at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle upon Tyne, from 18 October to 9 November. I’m hoping to head up there to see Hamlet again; Newcastle is actually closer to where I live than Stratford.