An immense task awaits the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new artistic directors who must attract top talent, prioritise verse-speaking and combine classic repertory and contemporary drama
It is all change at the top of British life. We have a new monarch, a new prime minister and, from June 2023, we will have two new artistic directors at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey. It looks like an inspired appointment, and it is not without precedent. Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands were joint artistic directors of the RSC from 1978 to 1986. Going back further in time, Anthony Quayle and Glen Byam Shaw ran the Shakespeare Memorial theatre, as it then was, from 1952 to 1956. Given the size of the present company, it makes sense to have two people at the top.
An immense task awaits them. Hit badly by Covid, the metropolitan bias of British culture and the marginalisation of Shakespeare, the RSC has lately lacked something of its former prestige: a company that was radical and necessary in the 1960s has begun to seem, despite the best efforts of Gregory Doran, an institution in need of redefinition. So what are the immediate tasks facing Evans and Harvey?
