The Reason Why: The Royal Shakespeare Season 1968

Summary

It is an enormous achievement that the Royal Shakespeare Company, since 1960, has been able to maintain such a large head of steam in so many parts of its machine. When the theatre history of the sixties comes to be written this company will occupy a dominant position. The National Theatre (a later starter) still shows but few signs of catching up with the devious, athletic and exciting pace of its rival. Indeed, so far as Shakespeare is concerned, it has shown more signs of fruitless emulation than studied competitiveness. A Much Ado which seemed a self-congratulatory refugee from comic opera and an As You Like It from the Danny La Rue stable represent the image that most people carry with them of the National’s inventive and creative conception of our national dramatist.

Peripatetic academics return annually to this country with optimistic but strangely frequent apologias about the events on the boards at Stratford Ontario and Connecticut. They remain in Stratford, England, awhile; they often fulminate about what they see at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but it is possible to detect, in the eyes, as they give you the last handshake, a look already of nostalgia for what they are leaving. So many of them tacitly seem to accept that, for all its shortcomings, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is the true and vital home of Shakespeare at mid-century.