Royal Shakespeare Company to send ensemble to NY
 

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre - Stratford-upon-Avon. Courtesy: Reuters

Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company will build a replica of its new Stratford-upon-Avon theater in New York for five performances by the company in 2011, theatre groups said on Monday. For the first time the famed classical theater company will send its entire cast of 44 actors and 23 musicians, as well as directors and stage management, to New York for five Shakespearean plays to be selected from the company’s current season. A full-scale replica of the company’s new Royal Shakespeare Theatre will be built for the six-week residency starting July 6 inside a Manhattan armory that will be turned into a theatre as part of New York’s Lincoln Center festival. The fate of the theatre after the productions is still undecided.

Props also likely to make the trip include four prosthetic wounds and five tins of lychees that are used as eyeballs, the company said.

The replica theatre, which uses a “thrust stage” that extends the stage platform into the audience, will cost several hundred thousand dollars to build, according to the New York Times.

“Our thrust stage, wrapping the audience around the action, allows people to reach out to the actors and to each other,” Michael Boyd, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said in a statement.

The five plays will be chosen from the company’s current line-up which includes Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet.

The company’s new Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which is undergoing redevelopment in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, is due to open later this year.

NEW YORK, REUTERS