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Royal takes on Old Vic with in-house company
By Alexa Baracaia, Evening Standard 09.07.07
Unique: the Theatre Royal is the only non-subsidised venue to launch its own company
Comeback: Ruthie Henshall will play a courtesan
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The Theatre Royal Haymarket is re-launching itself as a West End rival to Kevin Spacey's Old Vic, establishing an in-house company to produce full seasons.
It will be the only commercial venue in London to produce its programme this way, a practice more common at subsidised venues such as the Old Vic and Donmar Warehouse.
In an added twist, the Theatre Royal Haymarket Company will have a different artistic director for each season.
Former Almeida director Jonathan Kent will direct the first season, running from this September to November next year.
It will feature the West End comeback of Ruthie Henshall, two years after she left Britain for New York.
Theatre Royal chairman Arnold M. Crook said: "If this season works we are already having talks with other directors who are more than keen to follow on.
"The ideal would be to have the seasons running one after the other although we will bring in outside productions if there are gaps.
"It's exciting, it's something new and it's unique as far as commercial theatre in London is concerned.
"If you think of a theatre as bricks and mortar you're continuously looking for tenants and sometimes you get jolly good ones and other times you're struggling against all the other theatres in the West End. We felt we should try to control our own destiny."
The move is a fresh approach to dealing with the financial uncertainty of running commercial venues. Announcing a full season allows theatres to sell tickets well in advance - so if a first show proves a flop, the second or third may already be a sell-out.
Kent's season will open on 27 September with Patricia Hodge, Toby Stephens and David Haig starring in a revival of the William Wycherley restoration comedy The Country Wife.
The production - controversial for its sexual explicitness when it was first shown in 1675 - is a tangled tale of a rake faking impotence in order to have affairs with married women, along with the arrival in London of a naive "country wife". It was deemed so lewd that until 1924 only a "cleaned up" version called The Country Girl was staged.
Eileen Atkins will then lead the cast in a revival of Edward Bond's black comedy The Sea, running from January until April.
The play - set in an East Anglian seaside village at the height of a wild storm in 1907 - premiered at the Royal Court in 1973 but has rarely been revived in recent years.
It is part of a drive by Kent to re-establish Bond as one of the greats of 20th century British theatre.
The last major revival of a Bond play was Kent's 2005 Sheffield Theatres production of Lear, starring Ian McDiarmid.
The third production in the season will be the world premiere of new "high romantic" musical Marguerite, starring Henshall.
The actress - whose West End credits include Crazy For You, Cabaret, Fosse and She Loves Me - plays a famous courtesan in occupied Paris who has taken up with a Nazi officer.
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