A “searing” new production of Hamlet, works by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Miguel de Cervantes and the reopening of The Other Place are some of the highlights of the spring and summer 2016 season at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford.
RSC artistic director Gregory Doran said, “Stratford is the place to celebrate Shakespeare’s enduring influence and 2016 is surely the year to come to his home town.
“Our summer season opens with Erica Whyman’s nationwide touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation which involves our professional company working with 13 partner theatres, 14 amateur companies and 580 schoolchildren. This truly national production celebrates the UK’s passion for theatre-making and one of Shakespeare’s most loved plays.
“Our main house will then be home to one of the most famous and performed plays in the Shakespeare canon, Hamlet. In this production, directed by Simon Godwin, we hope to reveal new layers to this complex and inexhaustibly compelling play. Paapa Essiedu plays the title role.
“We will follow this with Melly Still’s production of Cymbeline, a late play with some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful language. We conclude the summer season with my production of King Lear. After his performance as Willy Loman in Miller’s Death of A Salesman, Antony Sher takes on the monumental title role.
“In the Swan Theatre,” he continued, “we want to place Shakespeare’s genius firmly in the context of his peers. We open with Marlowe’s great play Doctor Faustus, directed by Maria Aberg, and then mark two other important anniversaries.
“Shakespeare's great contemporary Miguel de Cervantes died on the same date as Shakespeare in 1616. We mark his own 400th anniversary by mounting a new adaptation of Don Quixote by James Fenton, directed by Angus Jackson, with David Threlfall as Don Quixote and Rufus Hound as Sancho Panza.
“We follow up Trevor Nunn’s current production of Ben Johnson’s Volpone with a new production of The Alchemist, directed by Polly Findlay.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation will run in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from 17 February until 5 March and from 15 June until 16 July. It will tour the UK between March and June.
Hamlet will be performed from 12 March until 13 August. It will be broadcast live in cinemas on 8 June. Paapa Essiedu who plays the title role was last at the RSC in 2013 playing Fenton in Philip Breen’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. In 2015 he appeared as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet at the Tobacco Factory.
Cymbeline takes to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage from 29 April until 12 August.
In the Swan Theatre, Marlowe’s tale of vanity, greed and damnation, Doctor Faustus, runs from 4 February until 4 August. In James Fenton’s adaptation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, David Threlfall takes the title role while Rufus Hound will make his RSC debut as Sancho Panza. It plays from 25 February until 21 May. The Alchemist by Ben Jonson will take to the stage from 26 May until 6 August.
The RSC’s research and development hub The Other Place will reopen in April 2016 with a discovery tour which will take visitors on a journey from Page to Stage—from the first day of rehearsals to the first performance—with an opportunity to look inside the RSC’s store of 30,000 costumes for the first time. A festival of new work will be held in the studio theatre in July; titles will be announced in spring 2016.