Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Waterside
Stratford-upon-Avon
Warwickshire
CV37 6BB
Ticket Hotline: 0844 800 1110 10am-6pm, Mon-Sat
As a company we give people the best possible experience of Shakespeare and live theatre. Everyone at the RSC, from actors to technicians, milliners to musicians, plays a part in creating the world you see on stage. Our work begins its life at our Stratford-upon-Avon workshops and theatres and we share it with audiences through our touring, residencies and online activity throughout the world.
Did you know that:
- As well as Shakespeare, we perform the work of his contemporaries, other classics and new work.
- 1 million visitors join us at our Stratford-upon-Avon theatres each year.
- We are a national company in the heart of the Midlands, performing throughout the UK and across the world.
- We have been making theatre in Shakespeare’s home town for over one hundred years, training generations of the very best theatre makers.
- We are the only theatre company with our own on-site armoury, producing breastplates, gauntlets, belts and weaponry .
- We have worked with 7200 amateur performers and ten partner theatres on our Open Stages project, championing amateur theatre nationwide.
- We reach 400,000 young people through our nationwide Learning and Performance Network, giving them a great first experience of Shakespeare.
- Matilda The Musical took seven years to develop and now performs to packed theatres in the West End and on Broadway.
- We are a registered charity (number 212481) and we generate 73% of our own income, alongside public investment from Arts Council England.
- Public funding for the arts makes up just 0.05% of Government spending and delivers an extraordinary return, supporting the performances you see on stages all over the country.
THE SEVEN ACTS OF MERCY at The Swan, Stratford on Avon
Drawing on Caravaggio’s painting, The Seven Acts of Mercy, as inspiration, Lustgarten’s play attempts a commonality between the seventeenth century painter’s relationship with power (nobles and the Church) and his ...
THE TEMPEST at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
There is a certain irony in that at the same time as Shakespeare’s Globe in London has parted company with its new(ish) director Emma Rice for being too technical, too untraditional and too innovative, that other great...
THE ROVER at The Swan, Stratford on Avon
The Rover is set in Naples during Cromwell’s reign. Amongst banished cavaliers eking out an existence as mercenaries, and women evading society’s restraints in the freedom of carnival. And Ingram’s coup de théâtr...
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN at The Swan, Stratford Upon Avon
A full synopsis is essential to understanding, but the main story is of two young warriors, cousins, intimate friends and captives of war. Their mutual devotion evaporates, when both fall in love with a beautiful girl se...
KING LEAR at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford.
Sher’s Lear is an arrogant power-force in a stark, fearful world of pagan gods. A semi-deity, first seen on high enveloped in gold embossed furs, lifted on a spectacular glass sedan chair. His fall to insignificance ...
THE ALCHEMIST at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
How has The Alchemist remained funny, slick and bang-on social target for four hundred years? Well imaginative productions like this one directed by Polly Findlay certainly help burnish its reputation. Essentially, howev...
CYMBELINE at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Here is some of the best of Shakespeare’s late poetry, and in Innogen one of his finest female characters. And if the final act resolves more confusions and coincidences than six Dickens’ novels, it transmits an end ...
HAMLET at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
The RSC’s new Hamlet is patently original. Gone are the cliché blond Nordic tresses so favoured by Olivier and others, gone are the wind-swept rocky battlements of Elsinore and in are the brightly coloured Afro fabric...
DON QUIXOTE at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
The present – whatever the truth - is always seen as a grossly lacking, cynical, depressing and ignoble era. So why not simply ignore reality, pick a supposed golden age and dream-shift into it?
That’s the plot of ...
DOCTOR FAUSTUS at the Swan, Stratford upon Avon
Twenty-four years fly by hellishly fast when they’re leading to a date with eternal damnation. That’s director Maria Aberg’s 105 minute, interval-less, zoom-through of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. And he...
QUEEN ANNE at The Swan, Stratford upon Avon
If your history lessons excluded Queen Anne or reduced her to a footnote, you can now compensate by meeting the real women in this RSC production of Helen Edmundson’s enthralling new play . . . Roll over the Elizabeth ...
WENDY AND PETER PAN at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Traditional pantomimes are not the only Christmas shows in town. Although the other shows dispense with the dame, the Good Fairy, Baron Hard-up and a slosh scene they still manage to conjure up all the magic and, more im...