The Royal Shakespeare Company: Making Shakespeare For The Next Generation
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4 hours ago
The RSC is a Great British Brands Award Winner 2025
The Royal Shakespeare Company is the winner of the Commitment To Craft award in our Great British Brands Awards 2025.
The Royal Shakespeare Company: Great British Brand 2025
‘Recently, we’ve been excited to see Shakespeare popping up everywhere, from the National and the West End to the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry.
One of the RSC’s greatest moments of the last decade was staging the world premiere of the Olivier-award winning My Neighbour Totoro in 2022 with Tokyo’s Studio Ghibli, cementing our ethos of reaching across borders and collaborating internationally. Another was the partnership between Greg Doran and David Tennant culminating in David’s Hamlet and Richard II. Simon Russell Beale’s The Tempest, in partnership with Intel and The Imaginarium Studios, was another turning point – a marriage of brilliant acting and design with technical innovation, combining live action with cutting-edge motion capture technology.
Stratford-upon-Avon has become the UK’s most visited town after London, with audiences coming from as far as Penzance, the Shetlands and 74 countries worldwide. Last spring, we launched our inaugural season as co-artistic directors with a full year of programming. We opened up all four theatres – the Royal Shakespeare theatre, the Swan, the newly invigorated The Other Place (where Judi Dench and Ian McKellen played Macbeth), which just turned 50, and the popular outdoor Holloway Garden Theatre.
Also in 2024, we announced the West End transfer of the dazzling political thriller Kyoto, while The Buddha of Suburbia transferred to the Barbican after opening at The Swan in an explosion of joy. Pericles transferred to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, marking Tamara’s directorial debut with us, and we staged Othello, Twelfth Night and The Red Shoes.
At our core is our creative learning and education work, reaching half a million children annually in 1,000 schools nationwide. Our research partnership with Oxford University, Time To Act, demonstrated that after exposure to RSC teaching, there were significant improvements in children’s language and academic achievements. Our work with ten schools in Middlesborough showed literacy levels soared from 68 percent to 93 percent over a decade.
Our First Encounters productions tour across the country, performing lively, accessible adaptations of Shakespeare for families. Our long-term challenge remains ensuring Shakespeare’s productions are pertinent, thrilling and available to people from all backgrounds, while competing with streaming services and podcasts. Pericles’s final line is ‘New joy wait on you’ and we’re seeing audiences respond joyfully to our first year of programming. In ten years, we hope that many more people will be involved with Shakespeare globally, inside and outside theatres – there’s even a Shakespeare-inspired video game being developed.’
Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, co-artistic directors
Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans
The Greatest Opportunities Ahead…
While Stratford-upon-Avon is home to the RSC, we have a long history of premiering new work in London and we’re building on this opportunity. In 2025, London has five RSC productions: Matilda the Musical, My Neighbour Totoro, Kyoto, Ben and Imo and 4.48 Psychosis.
We’re the only performing arts organisation with Independent Research Organisation status, enabling us to expand our pioneering work in schools and develop our role as an international centre for Shakespeare and performance, teaching, training and learning.
The Theatre Green Book provides us with guidance for making productions sustainably and improving the sustainability of our theatres and all other operations, with the goal of helping organisations reach net zero by 2030.
THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY
Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire CV37 6BB
+44 (0)1789 331111
