RSC Stages Game of Thrones Prequel 'The Mad King'
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Duncan Macmillan and Dominic Cooke wrote and directed the RSC's Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a 3-hour-45-minute stage prequel based on George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels and set as a direct prologue to HBO's Game of Thrones.
- Michael Shaeffer stars as King Aerys II, with long white beard and flower-braided hair the reviewer notes strongly resembles Laurence Olivier's television Lear.
- The RSC mounted the production partly for financial reasons, citing rising costs from current wars and Covid-era debts that include paying back government loans, with its musical Matilda's revenue no longer sufficient.
- Puppetry directors Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell operate vast skeletal frames manipulated by squads of actors to depict horses, dogs, and dragons across multiple jousts and battles.
- Chloe Lamford's set features a sacred tree formed by a rising trunk meeting descending foliage, plus real flames and mock fog swirling on a cruciform walkway through the stalls.
- The cast including Maxim Ays as Jaime Lannister, Michael Abubakar as Ned Stark, Daisy Franks as Cersei and Hughie O'Donnell's Lord Varys play younger versions of characters who appear as adults in the HBO series — two of whom are babies by the play's end.
- The BBC headlines the production as 'spectacular' in its own coverage of the opening, aligning with the reviewer's five-star verdict for devoted fans while flagging it as a three-star experience for those unfamiliar with the television series.
Why it matters: A publicly-funded national institution named for Shakespeare is staging an American fantasy franchise partly to service Covid-era government loans — a pragmatic financial pivot that the reviewer frames as a defensible audience-building move but one purists will read as mission drift from the RSC's house dramatist.
Ask SkimNews
