Shakespeare Performances in England 2010

Summary

6 January 2010. Snow in Stratford-upon-Avon. Thick snow. Snow such as hasn't been seen for thirty years. Drifts down Sheep Street. Black ice along Waterside. The town in grey gloom and muffled silence except for the hooting of boys from Shakespeare's grammar school, let out from classes early to get home before the next ice age sets in, pelting snowballs at each other, setting off mini-avalanches from snow-laden bare-branched chestnut trees in the Bancroft Gardens. I’m positioned on the tramway footbridge, looking across the frozen boat basin at a white wilderness towards the construction project I reported on two years ago (Shakespeare Survey 62). I’m taking stock. Then, I described the site of the demolished Royal Shakespeare Theatre as a rubble-strewn wasteland that put me in mind of post-war Warsaw. Now I’m looking at something like present-day Bruges, where twenty-first century architecture must fit a conservation agenda in a medieval town substantially invented in the 1900s with neo-Gothic in-fills, extensions and retro-renovations. I’m looking at pastiche and can't decide whether it represents a triumph of best-of-British provincial conservatism or a world-class failure of nerve. Left, beyond the snow-plastered construction hoardings, the ‘new’ riverside elevation is brand spanking old, restored to Elizabeth Scott's 1932 design, complete with metal-frame windows built to original specifications. Looking that way, I’m in the past. Looking right, though, towards the town-side, there's the future, ultra-modernity, an attention-seeking brick and glass observation tower, set slightly ‘off’ the main building, thrusting up higher than the theatre's new fly tower, with multi-level connecting corridors still open to the weather where workmen in yellow waterproofs are busy. (On a day like today, I muse, construction is a ‘dreadful trade’, worse than gathering samphire.) And between these two, facing me, the new RST's front façade is an architectural cut-and-paste job. The preserved ground floor and two storeys of Scott's foyer and dress circle are topped with a final half storey lifting the roof line, a postmodern flourish in glass, steel and brick. It's an odd cap on a matronly head – as though my twenty-something daughters had talked fifty-something me into an Amy Winehouse quiff.