One of the most visually stunning productions highlighted in the resource is a 1986 ‘Yuppie’ Romeo and Juliet, directed by Michael Bogdanov and starring Sean Bean and Niamh Cusack. Together with materials such as production records, photographs and original designs for some of the company’s most important productions, these can now be accessed online in AM’s resource Royal Shakespeare Company Archives: From Playwrights to Performance. The RSC’s archive provides more than just a documentary record of a theatre company: it can be used to survey how interpretations of the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights, and even theatre as an art form have evolved over more than a century.Īt the heart of the archive are prompt books recording the RSC and its predecessor’s productions, dating from the late nineteenth-century to the 2010s. The RSC and its predecessor the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre have created productions that are considered to be of huge significance, including Peter Brook’s radical 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Gregory Doran’s 2016 production of The Tempest, which utilised CGI technology in ways never before seen in the theatre. Specialising in the works of William Shakespeare, its productions have a reputation for being highly researched, often featuring innovative staging and costuming, and even introducing new technologies to the theatre. Considered one of the most important theatre companies of the twentieth century, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has an impressive production history.

Romeo and juliet play script primary