3:49 p.m. | Updated
The Royal Shakespeare Company opened its revamped home in Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday. Highlights include a renovated 1,040-seat thrust-stage theater that will bring audiences closer to the actors, a 118-foot viewing tower that overlooks the countryside, a riverside walk and rooftop restaurant.
The project took about three and a half years to complete for the equivalent of about $179 million, according to the company. The theater complex is open to the public, but performances on the new stage won’t begin until April. (A Hollywood-style trailer for the fall season is here.)
Early reviews of the remodeling are positive to mixed:
Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian: “It’s not what you’d call flash architecturally, but it does the job; the important thing is that many of the old problems of the theater are solved.”
Jay Merrick, The Independent: “The Royal Shakespeare Theater’s transformation by Rab Bennetts has turned a famously stolid architectural mongrel into a re-branded 21st-century visitor experience that is, by turns, engrossing, neutral and strange.”
Ellis Woodman, The Telegraph: “This is a project of dizzying intricacy – the product of highly taxing technical and conservation constraints – and not everything about it succeeds; but [the artistic director Michael] Boyd’s vision of the future of theater shines through it vividly.”
New Yorkers won’t have to travel to Britain to see the Royal Shakespeare in action, however. In February the company announced a lineup of five plays — including “Romeo and Juliet” and “Antony and Cleopatra” — that it will perform during a six-week residency on a site-specific stage to be built inside the Park Avenue Armory as part of next summer’s Lincoln Center Festival.
This video, provided courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company, provides a tour of the theater under construction and excerpts from recent productions:
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