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| Royal Shakespeare Company to stage Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy | Royal Shakespeare Company to stage Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy |
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| The Royal Shakespeare Company is creating a six-play adaptation of Robert Harris’s bestselling trilogy of novels about the Roman orator and politician Cicero, described by artistic director Gregory Doran as “Rome meets the West Wing”. | The Royal Shakespeare Company is creating a six-play adaptation of Robert Harris’s bestselling trilogy of novels about the Roman orator and politician Cicero, described by artistic director Gregory Doran as “Rome meets the West Wing”. |
| Doran, who will direct, said the plays would be the grand finale of the company’s Rome season this summer. Announcing the company’s plans for the forthcoming seasons on Wednesday, he said they could not be more relevant, tracing the role of the most renowned orator of his day – who gets just six lines in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – in a time of political turmoil and power struggles. | Doran, who will direct, said the plays would be the grand finale of the company’s Rome season this summer. Announcing the company’s plans for the forthcoming seasons on Wednesday, he said they could not be more relevant, tracing the role of the most renowned orator of his day – who gets just six lines in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – in a time of political turmoil and power struggles. |
| “In the same way that Shakespeare’s Rome plays could not be more pertinent, more resonant to today’s world, these plays give an even greater analysis of the politics of power.” | “In the same way that Shakespeare’s Rome plays could not be more pertinent, more resonant to today’s world, these plays give an even greater analysis of the politics of power.” |
| Harris’s trilogy, which launched with Imperium in 2006, have been adapted by Mike Poulton, who also adapted Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies into two award-winning stage plays. He said Harris, like Mantel, had just said “go for it” and given him complete freedom in the adaptation. He has compressed Harris’s weighty volumes into six one-hour plays – each, he promised, “with a beginning, a middle and an end” – which will be performed over two nights, with the world premiere at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon in November 2017. | |
| The company also announced a London transfer, to the Haymarket for 13 weeks from June, of its production of Queen Anne by Helen Edmundson, with Emma Cunliffe as the queen, and Romola Garai taking over the role of her friend the Duchess of Marlborough. | The company also announced a London transfer, to the Haymarket for 13 weeks from June, of its production of Queen Anne by Helen Edmundson, with Emma Cunliffe as the queen, and Romola Garai taking over the role of her friend the Duchess of Marlborough. |
| Doran said the new play followed on from the company’s season of plays with women at the centre, which were written in Shakespeare’s lifetime: “It was a challenge to find and commission a play with great roles for women beyond the age of 40, who were at the centre of things and not defined by the men in their lives.” | Doran said the new play followed on from the company’s season of plays with women at the centre, which were written in Shakespeare’s lifetime: “It was a challenge to find and commission a play with great roles for women beyond the age of 40, who were at the centre of things and not defined by the men in their lives.” |
| The company is also launching RSC Next Generation, building on its work with partner regional theatres and schools to spot talent and offer long-term training in acting, directing and backstage skills for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. | |
| Ray Fearon, who was brought up on the Stonebridge estate in north-west London, where he had only heard of Shakespeare as a local road name, and went on to star in many RSC productions including the title role in Othello, said many of the opportunities for free education in the arts in his day had now gone. Theatre, he said, had changed his life. “Among my friends quite a lot died, quite a lot went to prison, quite a lot got hooked on drugs, my life went a different way.” | |
| Other highlights of the coming year will include a world premiere of an adaptation by David Edgar of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, his first Dickens for the company since one of its greatest successes of the 1980s, Nicholas Nickleby. Directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, it will be the Christmas offering in the main house in Stratford. | Other highlights of the coming year will include a world premiere of an adaptation by David Edgar of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, his first Dickens for the company since one of its greatest successes of the 1980s, Nicholas Nickleby. Directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, it will be the Christmas offering in the main house in Stratford. |
| The musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, which has been running in the West End since 2011, as well as a touring version and a Broadway hit which has just closed, is still a major revenue earner for the company. | |
| Doran said they used the money for projects which couldn’t be funded otherwise, such as the live relays of plays to cinemas and schools – and he had just had a grateful letter from a woman who had enjoyed their King Lear in a converted barn in Fishtail, Montana. “We are hoping Matilda will last forever.” |