RSC to stage Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Clarke's Piranesi — SkimNews
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- Royal Shakespeare Company announced adaptations of Virginia Woolf's 1925 Mrs Dalloway and Susanna Clarke's 2020 Women's Prize-winning Piranesi, both staged in the Swan theatre and described by co-artistic directors as posing serious conundrums for adaptation
- Tamara Harvey will direct Mrs Dalloway, adapted by Zoe Cooper, opening in April; it becomes the third major English adaptation of the novel within a year, after Kit Green's touring one-woman show and Holly Robinson's version at the Yard in March
- Ned Bennett will direct Sami Ibrahim's adaptation of Piranesi, about a man trapped in a labyrinthine mansion; Bennett, per Evans, responded to the commission with: 'I don't know how to do this – so yes!'
- Evans and Harvey's season also includes four Shakespeare productions — Coriolanus starring Damien Molony, Richard II with Elizabeth Debicki, Romeo and Juliet directed by Joanna Bowman 'as if the lovers are going to live', and Robin Belfield's 80-minute touring Comedy of Errors
- Born With Teeth, Liz Duffy Adams's play about Shakespeare and Marlowe originally starring Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel, replaces the RSC's planned Othello, postponed while Sharon D Clarke undergoes cancer treatment
- The RSC is working with a cohort of six writers on new scripts, mentored by Zoe Cooper alongside Stewart Pringle, whose family drama Brock's Mill will be presented at the Other Place in spring
- Co-artistic directors Evans and Harvey, who took over in 2023, said the company faces a 'continually challenging' financial situation and will repay its Covid recovery fund loan in £1.2m annual instalments until 2040
Why it matters: Programming two stream-of-consciousness-era novels that the RSC itself calls 'hugely challenging' — while repaying £1.2m in Covid debt annually until 2040 and managing recent redundancies — reveals artistic ambition that competes directly with the company's financial squeeze. Audiences also get three concurrent Mrs Dalloway productions within a year, an unusual density for a single canonical novel.
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