The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Rome MMXVII Season of four Shakespeare plays will transfer to London’s Barbican Theatre from this November, straight from their run at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The plays will run in rep on the following dates:
- Coriolanus, directed by Angus Jackson – 6 November – 18 November 2017
- Julius Caesar, directed by Angus Jackson – 24 November 2017 – 20 January 2018
- Antony & Cleopatra, directed by Iqbal Khan – 30 November 2017 – 20 January 2018
- Titus Andronicus, directed by Blanche McIntyre – 7 December 2017 – 19 January 2018
Angus Jackson, who recently directed the sell-out RSC productions of Oppenheimer and Don Quixote, is season director for Rome MMXVII. He directs Julius Caesar which has just opened in Stratford, and will direct Coriolanus which opens in September, completing the Rome season in Stratford before its London transfer.
Iqbal Khan directs Antony & Cleopatra, with Josette Simon in the role of Cleopatra after her last RSC appearance in Michael Boyd’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1999 and Antony Byrne as Antony (last seen as Kent in Gregory Doran’s production of King Lear last year)
Blanche McIntyre directs Titus Andronicus, following on from last summer’s production of The Two Noble Kinsmen for the RSC. This opens in the RST in July this year.
A shared scenic aesthetic for all four plays is designed by Robert Innes Hopkins.
The full cast and creative teams will transfer for all four shows from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. However, in the London run the repertoire is reordered to bring out the chronological history of the themes and narratives in the plays.
Angus Jackson said of the repertoire:
“I am thrilled to be bringing the decadence of Shakespeare’s Rome to the Barbican. We are going to present these plays not in the order that they were written but in the order that the stories happen. Beginning with Coriolanus – a semi fictional character from 500 BCE – through to Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra, legendary characters who lived just before the birth of Christ. And finally, Titus Andronicus, in which we see an entirely imagined Rome at the end of its dominance. In this order we track the ascendance and the decline of a civilisation: the establishment of a Republic in the aftermath of the abolition of a monarchy, the Republic becoming an Empire and ultimately destroying itself.”
