In the Bard’s hometown, a challenge for theater leaders

NEW YORK: Outside peak tourist season, there's something a little uncanny about Stratford-upon-Avon, the English market town famous as William Shakespeare's birthplace and home. On a visit last week, with only a trickle of foreign sightseers and a few locals around, the town's cobbled streets, mock-Tudor pubs and quaint tearooms were eerily quiet. The occasional flock of schoolchildren on a field trip provided the closest thing to bustle.

And yet this tranquil place is home to one of the most venerable institutions of British cultural life: the Royal Shakespeare Company. Founded in 1961, with a mission to bring Shakespeare's work to a contemporary audience, the company is renowned for its diverse and forward-thinking repertoire: It presents modern spins on Shakespeare's plays alongside works by other playwrights, with a strong, craft-centric ethos geared toward nurturing emerging talent. With a roster of alumni that includes Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, the company's global prestige transcends its modest environs.

But when summer comes, the tourists will, too and this presents a perennial challenge for the Royal Shakespeare Company's leaders.

A lot of those visitors will want to see classical, period-dress productions that transport them to a picture-postcard England of yore, in keeping with Stratford's kitschy trappings. But contemporary treatments of Shakespeare's texts eschewing naturalism, foregrounding psychological elements and topical resonances are more in vogue. This is the conundrum facing Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, the troupe's new co-artistic directors, as they embark on their first season in charge.

For the first few decades of its existence, the company had one foot in Stratford and the other in London. It abandoned its London base in 2001, when the artistic director at the time, Adrian Noble, dismantled its permanent acting troupe in favor of a flexible model, with performers on short-term contracts.

This made it easier to sign up big-name stars, but it upset actors unions and some theater purists, like the theater historian Simon Trowbridge. In his pointedly titled 2021 book The Rise and Fall of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Trowbridge argued that the company should have ditched Stratford, and instead made its primary home in London, where Britain's largest theater audience is, only deploying the Stratford theaters during the busy summer season and perhaps at Christmas.

But the symbolic allure of Shakespeare's hometown was too tempting to give up. When I met Evans and Harvey for an interview, they made a persuasive case for the merits of keeping a base in Stratford. Harvey previously spent seven years as the artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, an arts center in Wales; Evans, a former actor with two Olivier Awards to his name, enjoyed fruitful spells at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1990s and 2000s, and was the artistic director of the Chichester Theater Festival before taking his current job.

Through a window in one of the Stratford rehearsal rooms, Evans said, you can see the church where Shakespeare was baptized and is now buried, and through another window you can see the school he went to, and through another you can see the house he bought for his wife and family later in life. Having rehearsed myself as a young actor in that space, he added, there was something to relish and savor about coming to make theater in the place where you can see and experience those things not in a way that is touristic, but in a way that brings you closer to the source.

Harvey said that there was a thing that happens when you are in a place that is not your everyday existence the focus that comes from that, and the sense of company. Which is something that we can offer that London theaters can't. It's a very American model in some ways: America has an extraordinary network of theaters outside of major metropolises.

There has always been a strong U.S. connection to the theater at Stratford. In the Victorian era, the town's burgeoning tourist industry was sustained by a constant flow of trans-Atlantic Shakespeare pilgrims.

It was actually Americans who first got it, Harvey said. In the 19th century, when two local brewery magnates, Edward Fordham Flower and Charles Flower, proposed building a theater in Stratford, the British public and the British theater world essentially said that idea's nonsense, Harvey said. The duo then went across the Atlantic, and it was American philanthropists and supporters who got the idea, and came on board, and made it possible, she added. The result was the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, built in 1879 and later renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theater.

Today, that playhouse is the Royal Shakespeare Company's flagship. Elsewhere in Stratford, the company also runs the 400-seat Swan Theater and a small studio theater called the Other Place. A new outdoor auditorium, the Holloway Garden Theater, will begin hosting outdoor performances from June.

Houman Barekat is a journalist