RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd talks about his vision for the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre auditorium.
The key driver for this project is the ambition and the excitement about completely changing the relationship between stage and auditorium. The belief that, increasingly, theatre's selling point is the ability to participate, to engage, to feel really involved in the action. The old RST [Royal Shakespeare Theatre] was built inspired by cinema architecture and it meant that most of the people were furthest away from the stage, and the furthest away people were 30 metres from the stage. This theatre, The Courtyard, that you can see behind me - already we've reduced that to 15 metres and we know that we can replicate that or even improve on that in the RST - and without that ambition, that possibility, I don't think we would have engaged in such a major rebuild.
What's happening already with The Courtyard at its best... on its best evenings are... it's a very warm gathering place for a thousand people and to watch each other across the stage and share in an evening's... not just entertainment but provocation - and I would like to make that an even stronger sense at the RST. I want it to be a theatre - and I think it will be a theatre where artists will be queuing round the block to perform on it: where actors, directors, designers are excited by the space. That, again, is already happening here at The Courtyard. Whereas people were always keen to perform in the Swan [Theatre] before, it took more persuasion to get them into the old RST and it doesn't need any persuasion now to have the best directors and the most exciting actors to want to come and perform here - and I think it will be a unique space. I don't think there's anywhere else that, on a crude level, brings so many people so close together with a great tension in the space - a great atmosphere in the space. There are smaller theatres that can achieve that in a sort of boutique way but getting a thousand people together... this will be a unique space in the world.
I don't think there's been another theatre project or indeed performance project anywhere that's had the privileged circumstances that we've had in The Courtyard Theatre here: our temporary theatre which we have built a year early, using the excuse of the Complete Works Festival , but also we've built it for our years when we're closed down the road while we're rebuilding - and by building it a year early we've given ourselves the opportunity to learn from this space - learn about acoustics, learn about audience circulation, learn about the experience for the actor - and most of the lessons have been extremely positive and encouraging and exciting and, of course, there are also snagging issues, some of which we're able to deal with, in here, in our temporary theatre as we run - and all of those issues have been fed through into our thinking for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, so it too will have, I'm sure, its issues but we're going into it with our eyes wide open from this experience.