No Rome of Safety: The Royal Shakespeare Season 1972 Reviewed

Summary

The 1972 season, despite Trevor Nunn’s understandable public hedging, was intended to be a very special one for the Royal Shakespeare Company. It saw Shakespeare’s four Roman plays ‘performed in a group for the first time anywhere’, Rank Strand Electric’s new computer system for stage lighting ‘used for the first time’, what the programme called ‘radical alterations’ to the auditorium designed to bring it closer to ‘the “one-room” relationship between actor and audience’ that will be a feature of the company’s Barbican theatre, and the installation of complex hydraulically-operated staging to permit sudden transformations of the whole stage picture.

Of at least equal theatrical significance (though, by contrast, quite unsung) was the confirmation of a change in casting policy. The three-year contracts that were a feature of Peter Hall's organisation have been replaced by single-season contracts. If this does not represent a total surrender, it is certainly a retreat; and its artistic implications are unmistakable. The British actor, we are to assume, comes ready-trained to this as to any other repertory theatre, there to be deployed by the British director. There is no time for serious discovery in such a system, no possibility of evolving a style of acting that will distinguish this company from every other.