RSC Members Newsletter October 2019

PREVIEW

THE NEWSLETTER FOR RSC MEMBERS

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OCTOBER 2019

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NEW SEASON ANNOUNCED

Priority Booking for Stratford-upon-Avon 2020 Summer Season MEMBERS’ PRIORITY BOOKING OPENS MONDAY 21 OCTOBER SUBSCRIBERS’ PRIORITY BOOKING OPENS MONDAY 4 NOVEMBER PUBLIC BOOKING OPENS MONDAY 11 NOVEMBER

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PRIORITY T ANNOUNCEMEN for King Kunene and the r London transfe

2 | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | ROYAL SHAKESPEARE THEATRE

SUMMER 2020 | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | 3

Summer Season 2020

Titus Andronicus in the Rome Season in 2017.

I am very excited at the chance to reassess this timely play. It is over a decade since we produced Pericles, when Dominic Cooke directed it in the Swan Theatre, in 2006, and nearly 20 years since it was performed in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in Adrian Noble’s 2002 production. Make sure you catch this one.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Gregory Doran introduces the Summer 2020 Season.

Image: Lolostock/Alamy

The sea divides families in all three of our plays next summer. Themes of separation and loss, and the restorative power of time connect them all.

Image: Susan Fox/Trevillion Images

A baby girl is abandoned on a seashore.

Twin toddlers are separated in a sea-storm.

A mother dies as a child is born at sea.

The Winter's Tale

The Comedy of Errors

The Winter’s Tale explores the corrosive effect of jealousy, and the domestic violence it engenders. Deputy Artistic Director Erica Whyman is reunited with designer Tom Piper to open the season with this great Late Play. They last worked together on the blade-sharp Romeo and Juliet and the brilliant musical Miss Littlewood (both in 2018). They have chosen to reimagine a timeframe for The Winter’s Tale which arcs 16 years from the era of Mad Men to the moon landings in the late sixties. Costume designs by Madeleine Girling.

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays and one of his funniest. Directed

by Phillip Breen and designed by Max Jones, the action takes place in the Mediterranean port of Ephesus where two sets of identical twins, separated since childhood, are reunited - but not until a great deal of confusion has ensued. Phillip directed last season’s delicious revival of The Provoked Wife, and the delirious production of Richard Bean’s The Hypocrite in 2017, which bodes well for his take on Shakespeare’s hilarious farce.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Pericles

Image: Charlotte Hjorth-Rhode/Trevillion Images

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Pericles roams the sea lanes from North Africa to the Levant. His daughter is born during a storm at sea, but her mother – it seems – dies giving birth to her. Pericles calls his daughter Marina in memory of that terrible event.

Director Blanche McIntyre notes how the play echoes the many stories of displaced families struggling to escape oppression, and forced to face the dangers of sea crossings in today’s Mediterranean. Designed by Robert Innes Hopkins.

Blanche directed a passionate production of the rarely-performed The Two Noble Kinsmen in 2016, and a visceral sardonic

Pericles was not one of the 36 plays included in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work. It was left out of the Second Folio too, and only joined the other plays in the Third Folio, printed in 1664. Why? Some have wondered if perhaps it was because he co-wrote the play with another author, George Wilkins. But then if solo authorship was the criteria for inclusion, why is Henry VIII in the Folio, but not The Two Noble Kinsmen, both of which he is thought to have written with John Fletcher, along with the lost play Cardenio. And many scholars now believe he collaborated with several other writers, including Thomas Middleton and Thomas Nashe. Both Edward III, and Sir Thomas More, all of which are now thought to have been at least partially written by him, are left out of the First Folio too.

With Pericles, we reach an important staging post in our own journey through the canon, which we started in 2013 with David Tennant in Richard II. We have only six more to go to complete the canon. How many have you seen? If you have missed any of the plays so far, you can of course fill in the gaps by watching them on DVD, available online from our RSC shop.

And if you need a reminder of the productions we have done in this series you can now see our wonderful illuminated Folio portraits hanging in the foyer as you enter the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

I hope you enjoy these powerful, moving and funny plays, written at either end of Shakespeare’s career. They will perform in repertoire in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from March until October when they transfer for a London season at the Barbican Theatre.

The Winter’s Tale will then tour England in 2021.

Gregory Doran Artistic Director

4 | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | PROJEKT EUROPA

PROJEKT EUROPA | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | 5

Celebrating Europe's past, present and future Maria Åberg, Season Director, and Judith Gerstenberg, Season Dramaturg, talk to us about Projekt Europa a season of work including three shows in the Swan Theatre, plus other work, events and activities.

The three Swan Theatre shows take inspiration from European stories new and old: Europeana, Peer Gynt and Blindness and Seeing. All the shows will be performed in English.

Theatre is a very good tool for examining the shifting political movements in Europe and helps open our minds to understand each other. We have invited European artists, directors and writers to work with us.

Language is our connection to the world not just verbal language but aesthetic language.

As part of the Europeana development workshops, we have been looking back at the 20th century, a very important time for the formation of Europe.

An integrated Europe was formed following the two world wars when several countries sought closer economic, social, and political ties to achieve economic growth and military security. This is sometimes forgotten in such a diverse continent, with such different cultures.

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, philosopher Francis Fukuyama

prophesied the “end of history”: a belief that, after the fall of communism, free-market liberal democracy had won and would become the world’s “final form of human government”; that we would have no more need for history.

We now know he was wrong, and this is the basis of Europeana.

Patrik Ouředník’s novel Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century represents the last century in all its contradictions and grand illusions, looking for a different narrative for the history. He demonstrates that nothing can be reduced to a single true viewpoint, but that we share different memories of the past – with our different cultures and languages, our histories and families. We are working together to adapt Europeana into an exciting piece of theatre.

Barbara Frey, former Artistic Director of Schauspielhaus Zürich and artistic director designate for the Ruhrtriennale is reimagining Ibsen’s epic European myth for the 21st century.

Peer Gynt is addicted to instant gratification, but driven by an increasingly desperate search for meaning.

Blindness and Seeing is a vision of the future

by Nobel Prize winning Portuguese writer José Saramago. At the start, a city is overcome by an epidemic of blindness that spares only one woman. She becomes a guide for a group of seven strangers and serves as the eyes and ears for the reader in this profound parable of loss and disorientation. We return to the city some time later for a satirical commentary on government in general and democracy in particular. Renowned Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues, Artistic Director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria in Lisbon, will combine the two books into one production.

CREATING THE SHOWS For a lot of new writing produced in UK theatres, a writer produces a script and the director leads the actors to a finished performance for public consumption. At the RSC, with a playwright in our Company name, our audiences are very used to seeing work created in this style.

The European theatre-making style is generally a more organic process and quite

different. For the European style, a dramaturg works closely with the director to create the shape of a production.

In July, workshopping Europeana, we worked with a group of actors to see how the material in the novel functions, what it can give us, what opportunities it has, what possibilities there are for staging.

Everyone carries a different responsibility when collaborating in such a way. The actors in the workshop have relished the challenge to work in a very different way. The process itself is really important and all actors will be developing their skills.

We will continue to work together to create a structure for the first day of rehearsals.

When rehearsals begin, the actors will be encouraged to help develop the ideas further.

All three shows will have one ensemble of actors, working towards the performances of these three pieces on the Swan Theatre stage in Summer 2020. This model cannot be replicated by another theatre company at a different time. These are not off-the-shelf productions that you could see anywhere else in Europe.

We have commissioned Theodora Dimova, Shumona Sinha, Sjón, Christos Ikonomou, Yıldız Çakar, Davide Carnevali and Sivan Ben Yishai - writers on the geographical edges of Europe - to write short monologues which will be performed at The Other Place.

Swedish director Mattias Andersson, Artistic Director of Backa Theatre in Gothenburg and incredibly well respected for creating theatre for young people, will work with our Next Generation Project. Together they will present the young people's vision for their future and for that of Europe.

Projekt Europa has been in planning since early 2017 when Gregory Doran invited Maria to consider this exciting opportunity.

Maria and Judith first met in March 2018.

The two-week workshop in July 2019 was the first sustained workshop on the project and focussed on the first show, Europeana.

Rehearsals start at the end of January 2020 and the Swan Theatre season opens in April 2020.

XX EUROPEANA

XX BLINDNESS AND SEEING

XX PEER GYNT

The making of the trailer. On set, ready to start filming.

King John Swan Theatre Until 21 March 2020

Director Eleanor Rhode Designer Max Johns Lighting Lizzie Powell Music Will Gregory Sound David Gregory Movement Tom Jackson Greaves Fights Rachel Bown-Williams

Ruth Cooper-Brown

Our Education Workshop space is transformed into a film set to create the King John trailer.

COMPANY

Michael Abubakar

Sarah Agha

David Birrell

John Cummins

Houda Echouafni

Ali Gadema

Nicholas Gerard-Martin

Zed Josef

Nadi Kemp-Sayfi

Brian Martin

Tom McCall

Corey Montague-Sholay

Katherine Pearce

Richard Pryal

All King John photos by Sam Allard

Rosie Sheehy will play King John.

WATCH THE TRAILER RSC.ORG.UK/KINGJOHN

Zara Ramm

Charlotte Randle

Bridgitta Roy

Rosie Sheehy

Miranda Curtis - Season Supporter, Swan Theatre Winter 2019 King John is supported by RSC Production Circle member Marcia Whitaker The RSC Acting Companies are generously supported by The Gatsby Charitable Foundation and The Kovner Foundation

8 | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | CREATING A NEW MUSICAL

Mark Ravenhill shares his experience of writing his first ever musical, an adaptation of David Walliams’ heart-warming comedy, The Boy in the Dress.

Director Gregory Doran Designer Robert Jones

Choreographer Aletta Collins

Orchestrators Guy Chambers and Tom Deering Musical Supervisor Bruce O’Neil Lighting Mark Henderson Musical Director and Arrangements Alan Williams Sound Paul Groothuis and Tom Marshall Puppetry Director Laura Cubbitt Dramaturg Pippa Hill

I first read David Walliams’ novel The Boy in the Dress in 2012 when I was RSC playwright in residence. I was immediately spellbound by the book. Its world of rich comic characters and moving coming-of-age story have all the elements of a contemporary children’s classic.

I also saw that it had enormous potential for making a theatre piece. A central character who discovers themselves through cross dressing is quintessentially theatrical. It’s a theme that Shakespeare returned to again and again in his plays.

I also realised that the story had just the right number of characters and the right length of story for the “two hours traffic of the stage”.

Readers, particularly young readers, like adaptations to be as close as possible to a much–loved book. So, it was a relief to realise that it wouldn’t be necessary to cut huge chunks of the plot or to combine or kill off characters.

When I met David Walliams to talk about the possibility of a stage adaptation, he suggested that it could be a musical. I was thrilled by this possibility. I’ve always wanted to be part of the making of a musical, ever since I used to dance around the living room aged four to our family LPs of The Sound of Music and Oliver!.

In a musical the highs and lows of the characters happen during songs. The job of the dialogue and scenes – the bit that I’ve written – is to take the characters to the moment where their experience is so strong that the only option they have is to sing.

This article originally appeared in Issue 11 of Radical Mischief

CREATING A NEW MUSICAL | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | 9

But the most important thing to be clear about is the story that you’re telling. All the elements of dialogue, song, dance and spectacle need to be working together to tell the story as clearly and as vividly as possible.

So, I first wrote a draft of the stage version of The Boy in the Dress which focussed on the dialogue, indicating where the songs might be, thinking about the distribution of songs between characters and of a balance of moods from songs of high comedy to high emotion. In this draft, I quoted excerpts from David’s book that might give some inspiration for lyrics.

As I thought about the musicals that focussed on a child protagonist, I realised that they all introduced a solo song for the central character early on. A song that allows the audience to have immediate access to the child character’s inner world and means that they will identify with the hero for the rest of the evening. Dorothy Gale sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, Annie sings “Tomorrow” near the top of Annie and Oliver sings “Where Is Love?” about ten minutes into Oliver!. Three songs all sung by orphans, each with an intense longing for love and for a better world. In our show, Dennis’ first song “If I Don’t Cry” plays a similar role and is an important number to carry an audience through the story.

Once Guy Chambers and Robbie Williams had written a full set of songs, we were able to use a workshop to explore how the dialogue and music could be interwoven to create an integrated piece of storytelling.

Later workshops have allowed us to investigate how dance and staging would allow us to tell David Walliams’ story.

As the show goes into rehearsals, I’ll be in the rehearsal room to make some small cuts and re–writes, to continue the process of keeping our story clear and strong. But also, just to enjoy the sheer joyful pleasure being part of my first ever proper musical!

The Boy in the Dress plays in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from 8 November – 8 March 2020.

The Young Company with David Walliams. Photo by Joseph Bailey

EXCLUSIVE PATRONS’ EVENT Meet the Director of The Boy in the Dress

Thursday 24 October, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 6 - 8pm, FREE Please book in advance. Tickets are limited to two per supporter.

As The Boy in the Dress prepares to take to the stage, Artistic Director Gregory Doran invites you to join him and the show’s creatives for a unique insight into this brand new production. The Creative Team will be assembled in Stratford-upon-Avon as the final rehearsals get underway, so please join us to hear about the show’s progression from children’s book to stage musical.

To upgrade your support to Patron to attend this event, please call Michele Cottiss on 01789 27 2283 or email michele.cottiss@rsc.org.uk

The Boy in the Dress is supported by RSC Production Circle members Elizabeth Boissevain and Andrew Jeffreys, Charles Holloway, Ms Teresa Tsai and Kathleen J. Yoh The work of the RSC Literary Department is generously supported by The Drue and H.J. Heinz II Charitable Trust

10 | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | HANNAH KHALIL IN CONVERSATION

HANNAH KHALIL IN CONVERSATION | PREVIEW OCTOBER 2019 | 11

A Museum in Baghdad

COMPANY

Hannah Khalil talks about her new play A Museum In Baghdad

ILLUSTRATION BY JULIEN PACAUD. ORIGINAL PHOTOS BY AL FOOTE III & RICHARD LAKOS

Can you tell us why you wanted to give voice to Iraqi men and women from 1926 and 2006?

Both these periods of time are extremely significant in the history of the Middle East.

We rarely touch on Middle Eastern stories in the consideration of history in Europe and when we do it's always from a Western point of view, the soldier or diplomat discovering fair Arabia. Iraq in both these periods is overlooked and absolutely shouldn't be.

“Gertrude Bell is such an important historical figure” The work of the RSC Literary Department is generously supported by The Drue and H.J. Heinz II Charitable Trust

How aware were you of wanting to counter the stereotypes that we see in our dramatic fiction of Arab culture and of characters of middle eastern heritage?

Very, very, very aware – trying to redress the balance of the way Arabs are portrayed on stage and screen is one of the reasons I started writing in the first place.

I have always considered representations of Arabs and Muslims to be completely stereotypical and narrow (especially in film and TV) and I'm so sad that it's not getting better, it's getting worse, so I want to try and do my own little thing about that in my writing.

Several of your protagonists are women. How conscious were you of wanting to foreground both Arab women, and women who have demonstrated pioneering leadership?

Arab woman are all too often overlooked in life and in history, but they've played a key role of course. If Arab men are stereotyped, Arab women are doubly so, and that stereotype of the meek, subservient veiled lady is not one I recognise or have ever met in life. One of the characters in A Museum in Baghdad is inspired by a real–life Iraqi female archaeologist who worked to rebuild the museum after the looting;

Sarah Agha

David Birrell

Houda Echouafni

Emma Fielding

Ali Gadema

Rendah Heywood

Zed Josef

Nadi Kemp-Sayfi

Debbie Korley

Richard Pryal

Zara Ramm

Riad Richie

Rasoul Saghir

a powerhouse of a woman, determined and strong. This is much more representative of the Arab women in my life.

Gertrude Bell is such an important historical figure but when I came across a portrait of her in the National Portrait Gallery in 2010, I was amazed I'd never heard of her. It seems she was overlooked by the feminist movement in the seventies when they were reclaiming female historical figures because of her anti–suffrage stance. I set about learning about her and was shocked that she wasn't a household name – certainly if she'd been a man everyone would know who she was, as they do her contemporary TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). So, I absolutely wanted to bring her story to the fore in this play too.

The play looks hard at Britain's colonial relationship with Iraq and raises complex questions about how to acknowledge our colonial past. Has writing the play made you think differently about aspects of British history?

It's easy to see colonialism in very black and white terms but the truth is the European colonial influence on the world is a myriad of greys. Without it my Irish mother and Palestinian father would probably never have come to London and I wouldn't exist! But we also probably wouldn't have the deep divisions in the Middle East – and wider world – that exist today. Ultimately it feels

to me like even if some of the individuals involved in colonial projects had good intentions, the overall aim was for Europe to benefit from those colonised countries' assets. The legacy of colonialism is deeply complicated and nuanced so that's my big takeaway. It's not remotely straightforward, as the characters in the play attest.

What are the challenges of deciding to write about a part of the world that is still suffering relentless violence and still navigating sectarianism?

I'm very aware and cautious about depicting violence in theatre – which is essentially an entertainment setting – when it's really happening to real people right now. The responsibility of writing about live issues is something I cannot forget and that I don't take

Director Erica Whyman Designer Tom Piper Lighting Charles Balfour Music and Sound Oǧuz Kaplangi Movement Tanushka Marah Dramaturg David Grieg Video Nina Dunn

lightly at all. I arm myself with knowledge and sensitivity, try and interrogate choices I make in my work very carefully and take advice from the many knowledgeable and supportive collaborators I'm privileged to work with.

What can theatre do to make positive change in the world?

Theatre at its best can awaken our humanity, our empathy, it can make us see things from other people's point of view and unlock academic arguments allowing them to become more than facts and figures. There's something magical about real people speaking real words in front of us that can allow us to understand stories and the world afresh.

A Museum in Baghdad plays in the Swan Theatre from 11 October.

Gertrude Bell

1868–1926 Gertrude Bell studied history at Oxford University and embarked on a career as a writer, traveller and archaeologist. Fluent in Persian and Arabic, she worked for the British government in Cairo during World War I. She contributed to the construction of the Iraqi state in 1921, as well as the National Museum of Iraq. Bell died in Baghdad on 12 July 1926.

This article originally appeared in issue 11 of Radical Mischief. A Museum in Baghdad was co-commissioned by the RSC and the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

UP DAT E

Ian McKellen helps us reach our public fundraising target

Ian McKellen views the redevelopment of the Costume Workshop on Waterside Stratford-upon-Avon, as the Stitch In Time Campaign meets its fundraising target. Photo by Sam Allard Ian McKellen bought his one man show, Ian McKellen On Stage to the RSC on 21 July continuing his 80th birthday celebrations by touring 80 venues around the UK and donating the profits to each theatre. Ian performed in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Swan Theatre, both were sold-out and enjoyed by all who were lucky enough to get tickets.

These performances, and collections after the shows, raised money for our Stitch In Time Campaign achieving our public fundraising target of £3 million.

We would like to thank everyone who supported the Campaign. Over 30,000 people have made a gift to restore and redevelop our Costume Workshop in

Stratford-upon-Avon. The Costume Workshop will reopen in Summer 2020 and for the first time, visitors will be able to experience our world-class costume workshop for themselves through tours, digital experiences, education, participation and outreach opportunities.

The restoration and redevelopment of the Costume Workshop is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, and The Government’s Local Growth Fund through the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership, with additional support from the Garfield Weston Foundation, Lydia and Manfred Gorvy, The Foyle Foundation, Coats – Official Thread Supplier to the RSC, The Wolfson Foundation and other generous supporters.

PREVIEW In your next newsletter

██An insight into our new show, The Whip ██An update for our major new musical The Boy in the Dress ██Gift ideas for the festive season