Would you please turn me off?’ Michael Boyd, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, is commanding an RSC techie to turn off his lapel microphone at the opening of the RSC’s brand new theatre in Stratford. Boyd needs his mic turned off so he can turn his back to the audience and whisper towards the backstage, all to illustrate that this brand new theatre has acoustics that allow his whisper to be heard by every single seat in the 1,000 seat house. You would expect such a display of theatrical wonder at the unveiling of the world renowned theatre nestled in Shakespeare’s birthplace.
But the real moment of awe comes not from Boyd’s audible whisper but rather from a suited architect who stands up in the audience to explain why there is no carpet on the theatre floors under the newly renovated, and comfortable, theatre seats. ‘These wooden floors acoustically allow the audience to be aware of their own noise. Not in a negative way, not in a rustle of sweets wrappers way—but it means that when a laugh starts in a corner of the theatre, the sound will run across the entire house. When the audience gasps, they will hear their own gasp. Every gasp and laugh is audible.’
These wooden floors that reflect gasps and laughs are a perfect microcosm of the vision behind the RSC’s new space: that vision is audience engagement. From the deep thrust stage that is now the standard across all three RSC theatres in Stratford to the perfect sightlines from every seat, the audience was possibly more in mind than the actors when creating this new theatrical space.
Of course, such renovations, or should I say total demolition and reconstruction, were the perfect opportunity to fix a few recurrent problems for staging plays at the RSC. For instance, the troublesome fact that two of the theatres shared the same back wall which meant you could hear the canons in Richard III in the background to As You Like It in the theatre next door. Then there was the shared backstage space, which meant a more than one actor getting confused and making their valiant entrance into the wrong play altogether.
All these problems have been field. But the bigger problem that Michael Boyd and the development engine behind the RSC are trying to address is that of the audience. The unspoken question behind the opening of the new space is how can theatre compete in a contemporary society dominated by phenomena like reality TV, YouTube and digital media? Answering this question, Michael Boyd is standing up, rushing about the shiny new thrust stage, gesturing widely: ‘We’re not good at social gatherings. But that’s what the theatre is—its democratic, it speaks to how we can love and live together. That’s what this space is about: the audience and actors together realizing that they have a different view and looking into each other’s faces. It’s about being a place for community.’ This sentiment is aimed not only at current theatre-goers (more often than not silver-haired retirees) but at the next generation. The new RSC space has no ‘ghetto-ized seats’ reserved for school trips. Each seat has a perfect view. Why? Because, as Michael Boyd says, the theatre needs to ‘reinvent itself for the next generation’.
Reinventing the architecture and acoustics of a 1,000 seat theatre wouldn’t seem to be the kind of work that best recruits a new generation of theatre-goers. But Boyd seems convinced that if the theatre is not only to survive but thrive, it has to offer something unique. That uniqueness is in the wooden floors of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre itself; it is ready and waiting to echo back to us the laughter and gasps that can only happen in a community of people sitting together to share something together. Something like a play.
