The Royal Shakespeare Company, which keeps the plays of William Shakespeare alive in the town of his birth, was long a regular presence in the United States. It brought Ian McKellen to Brooklyn as King Lear, built a replica of its main theater in an Upper East Side drill hall and sent a stream of shows to Broadway.
But in recent years the renowned troupe has taken fewer overseas trips from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Now, for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic, the company has returned to the United States — but not to New York, where some of the main importers of European work remain diminished and disoriented. It has struck up a partnership with Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which is led by Edward Hall, whose ties to the Royal Shakespeare Company run unusually deep: His father, Peter Hall, the eminent British director, founded it.
“My love of Shakespeare grew up from my father talking to me about Shakespeare, and why he was passionate about Shakespeare, and why he thought Shakespeare endured, and quoting Shakespeare,” he said. “I watched him work a bit, and then, like every child, you go off into a corner and find your own way, which is what I did.”
His earliest memory of Shakespeare is watching “The Wars of the Roses,” directed by his father, when he was 4 or 5, and “seeing a lot of people in armor with very exciting-looking weapons.”
Hall, who is now an accomplished stage and screen director with plenty of Shakespeare productions under his belt, said that when he got the Chicago job, one of his first emails was to Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, the new artistic directors of the R.S.C., asking what it would take for them to work together.
His timing was good: Harvey and Evans, trying to put their own stamp on the venerable R.S.C., were eager to find wider audiences for their work.
“For us, it was a no-brainer, because it feels like that relationship with North America is really important,” Evans said. He noted that American philanthropy has played a significant role in the R.S.C.’s life, but, even more, he said, “it was strategically important for us to collaborate internationally — crossing borders, making connections.”
The first result of the new relationship is a lyrical staging of “Pericles,” one of Shakespeare’s later and lesser-known works, which is about a prince on the run and the wife and daughter he loses and finds along the way. When it ran in Stratford-upon-Avon over the summer, The Guardian gave it four stars. Now playing on Chicago’s Navy Pier, overlooking Lake Michigan, The Chicago Tribune called it “a gorgeous, not-to-be-missed production.”
There are notable differences in the audience reactions in the two countries. The audience at Chicago Shakes, as the American company is often called, was more responsive, laughing at some of the play’s zanier plot twists (pirates!), with sporadic outbursts of approval (for romance) and disapproval (for incest). “The thing that’s been fascinating in terms of the audiences is how much more vocal they are,” Harvey, who directed both productions, said of the Chicago run, “and also how deeply they felt the need for a story that ends in reunion and hope and understanding.”
Chicago Shakes, a nonprofit, raised money from donors to defray the costs of the production, which included bringing the British cast members to the United States and housing them for the duration of the run, as well building a set that is a replica of the one in England. About 16,000 people are expected to see the show during its Chicago run, said Kimberly Motes, the company’s executive director.
Their partnership is being forged as the number of professional Shakespeare productions in the United States has fallen since the pandemic. “I’m calling it the Great Shakespeare Shrinkage,” said Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar who is an English professor at Arizona State University and a member of the R.S.C. board. “There are whole swaths of the U.S. where you cannot see Shakespeare in a given year.”
At the same time, Shakespeare is one of the most popular playwrights on Broadway this season, with a fall production of “Romeo + Juliet” starring Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler and a spring production of “Othello” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal both selling strongly, while Off Broadway, at the Shed, Kenneth Branagh, an R.S.C. alum, is currently starring in “King Lear.”
The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is leaning hard into the partnership, emphasizing the R.S.C.’s long absence and its prestige in advertisements.
“We share a common love of Shakespeare, and it is important to our audiences that we continue with our commitment to the works of Shakespeare,” said Paulita Pike, the chair of the Chicago theater’s board, who grew up in El Salvador, where she first encountered Shakespeare’s work in high school. “Part of what we’ve been focused on has been to take our work outside of Chicago, and to bring the world to Chicago, and this is a key part of that.”
It helped that Hall and the new R.S.C. leaders all knew each other from their days running smaller theaters in Britain. Hall started his own Shakespeare troupe (Propeller) and ran a London theater (Hampstead) before becoming the artistic director of the Chicago company last year. Harvey led Theatr Clwyd in Wales, while Evans, familiar to Broadway audiences as the star of a 2008 “Sunday in the Park With George” revival, ran theaters in Sheffield and Chichester, England.
The R.S.C. leaders say the Chicago relationship is the start, but not the end, of their plans to resume presenting work in the United States.
“We’re in really active dialogue with a number of different theater companies and producers in New York,” Harvey said. “I don’t think we see it as an either/or. We would love to be bringing work and vibrating in both cities, and indeed others across the U.S.”
One project with stateside hopes: “Hamlet Hail to the Thief,” which is a mash-up of the Shakespeare tragedy and the Radiohead album. The project is scheduled to run in Manchester, England, next spring, and then at the R.S.C. next June; if all goes well in Britain it could have an American future.
While there has been Shakespeare performed in Stratford since the 19th century, the Royal Shakespeare Company was founded in its current form by Peter Hall in 1961. For a time, it transferred shows to Broadway with enough frequency that, in 1984, the critic Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, “Much as we enjoy our annual ration of R.S.C. goodies, we can’t help regarding the R.S.C.’s prowess as God’s damning judgment on the failings of the New York theater.”
But it has not transferred a Shakespeare production to Broadway since 1996 (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and it has not brought a new show to Broadway since 2015, when “Wolf Hall” opened. (The R.S.C., like Chicago Shakes, focuses on Shakespeare, but also develops work by other authors, including “Matilda the Musical,” which opened on Broadway in 2013 and continued to run there until 2017.)
The British company was also once a regular presence Off Broadway, occasionally on quite a grand scale. In 2011 for example, the company constructed a replica of its Royal Shakespeare Theater inside the drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory and brought over 46 shipping containers for a six-week residency in which it performed five Shakespeare plays. The company first performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Peter Brook) and went on to become a regular presence there, bringing Vanessa Redgrave there to play Hecuba, David Tennant to play Richard II, and a “Julius Caesar” set in Africa.
But the era of tours of that scale is past, and the last R.S.C. Off Broadway production of any size was “Timon of Athens,” which ran at Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn in 2020, just before the pandemic forced theaters to close. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called that production “short on troops.”
“The R.S.C. has tried to make inroads in a number of ways in the U.S., but their mission is British and their audience and their touring tends to be British,” said James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar who is a professor of English at Columbia University and served for a decade on the R.S.C.’s board of governors. “The problem is always who is going to pay for it on this side, and what kind of long-term relationship can they establish. Maybe Chicago will be a beachhead.”
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