On the morning after Storm Isha, the sun has come out in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the swans are swimming calmly along the swollen river as it runs past the theatre that is home to the Royal Shakespeare Company. In a meeting room overlooking the scene, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans exude the same sense of bright serenity. The RSC is one of those British institutions on which everyone from its president, King Charles III, downwards has a view, but its two new co-artistic directors are up for the challenge.
“People do view the RSC as being vital to the life of the country and we are just fortunate that we are the current custodians of that, and want to take it forward,” says Evans, in his warm Welsh tones. Harvey laughs and adds: “And that’s the great joy of doing it together. In the moments when I just want to curl up in a dark corner and cry, there’s someone saying, no, it’s all right, come on, we can do this. These jobs – the National, the RSC – are mammoth. So that is why we wanted to do it shoulder to shoulder.”
Having applied for the job as a duo, they’ve been in post since June 2023 and have just announced their plans for the year ahead – a judicious mixture of tragedy and comedy, new and old, long and short. They built the season by simply approaching people they wanted to work alongside and asking what they wanted to stage. The results range from Emily Burns’s contemporary take on Love Labour’s Lost set in the world of a Musk-like tech bro, starring Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson, to a King Lear in Ukrainian and Luke Thallon as Hamlet, directed by Rupert Goold. Alongside Shakespeare, there’s new work across four stages including an adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and revivals of plays by Sheridan and Marlowe.
“We don’t want to be in the place where we say we haven’t done Two Noble Kinsmen for five years, we’d better do it,” says Evans, outlining their thinking. “We are much more about having conversations with artists and asking what do you connect with, what excites you, what are you passionate about?” Harvey chips in: “We want the work on our stages to feel relevant and resonant. That doesn’t mean it’s set now, but it means there’s an immediacy and urgency to it.”
This is how they talk, sitting side by side at a table, listening carefully to one another, expanding each other’s answers. Both are passionate and fluent advocates for theatre, but they readily admit that they were not the most obvious choice to succeed Gregory Doran as leaders of an institution that places a 400-year-old playwright at its heart.
Evans checks with Harvey before he proceeds. “One of the things we should just be candid about is that we didn’t know whether we were right because we didn’t consider ourselves to be Shakespeare scholars. We love Shakespeare, and we have directed and acted in Shakespeare but because Greg had such an encyclopaedic knowledge of Shakespeare, we thought that was maybe what was needed.
“When we met the chair, Shriti Vadera, she excited us in a very different way, which was thinking about the organisation as a whole. We have 21 years of running companies and running theatres between us. We bring a passion for Shakespeare, and a passion for language but also a passion for new writing and how these things can sit side by side, sometimes in radical tension with one another.”
Their trajectories to this point have been quite different. Born in Wales, Evans is an Olivier award-winning actor who left drama school for a job at the RSC. “I spent my 20th and my 30th birthday working here as an actor,” he says. “Then I celebrated my 50th here last year, which is sort of strange.” He has previously been artistic director at the Sheffield Crucible and Chichester Festival theatre. Harvey was born in Botswana, grew up in Brighton, and went to Bristol University where she set up her own company. She trained on the job, in the UK as an assistant director at Shakespeare’s Globe (under Mark Rylance and Tim Carroll) and in the US at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, and worked as a freelance director before becoming artistic director at Theatr Clwyd.
They met first in 2015 when Harvey directed Pride and Prejudice at Sheffield and stayed in touch. “Then in the pandemic we became each other’s batphone,” says Harvey. “Talking about what we were cancelling, what we were doing about things. That was when we started talking about what it would be like to be artistic directors together.”
Evans adds: “I think that conversation came out of sharing the responsibility we both felt towards the freelance community because they were truly shafted during the pandemic. We recognised that leadership was going to change, the nature of it, the care, the empathy, the heart and head and gut that one was going to need. People have said these big jobs are not doable, they’re untenable – but actually it’s amazing to do it with someone.”
They now share an office, a vision and the decision-making process. Harvey asks a lot of questions at the start – “I can get bored with too many questions,” Evans admits – while he dives in later. “We have shared values, which is vital, but definitely bring different qualities,” says Harvey. “That’s incredibly helpful when we are debating something, trying to build a programme.” “I would say though that every single piece in our first season is something we have both jumped in and said yes, we both believe in that,” says Evans. “I think that gives it strength.”
What happens if they disagree? Do they have a conflict resolution plan? “We’ve actually got one written down as part of the application process,” says Harvey, laughing, while Evans adds: “We hope not to agree on everything because debate is important. But we have said as a headline to staff that if there are disagreements, it will be our business and nobody else’s.” “It’s like parenting,” Harvey jokes. “We’ve agreed if one of us makes a decision, the other will stand by that even if behind closed doors we say, why did you say that? We will never make it anyone else’s problem.”
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Parenting is a subject much on Harvey’s mind. She has moved to Stratford from a village in Wales with her husband and two children, aged five and eight, and she is conscious of the upheaval. “Everyone says children bounce at that age, and they do, but it’s quite a long, slow bounce and my daughter had a moment the other day of ‘Oh, I miss all my friends’. It’s tricky.”
Throughout her career she has been conscious of the need to make theatre an easier place to work in for people with families. Significantly, her principal worry about the next five years is “how to be a mum and how to be a co-artistic director”.
“I am so wary of family becoming a factor, that [when a domestic issue arises] I will hesitate, and Daniel [who does not have children and whose partner lives in London] will be the one to say ‘Go home, don’t answer the phone,’” she explains. “But it’s tough and there is no one-size-fits-all. The things I need in order to make my job possible as a mother are totally different from the things that someone with a newborn baby or someone who is looking after ageing parents needs. All we can say is: ask for what you need and know that we will listen. We won’t be able to do all of it, but we will meet you in the conversation. And it is brilliant to look at the National Theatre and see Indhu Rubasingham about to take over there. Having different voices around the table is happening.”
Both Harvey and Evans have an impressive track record when it comes to improving diversity – in terms not just of gender, but of race, disability and class as well. But they recognise the need for care. “The thing we both feel passionate about avoiding is any whiff of tokenism,” Evans says. “We are open to gender changing but with rigour and meaning.” Harvey finishes the thought. “It isn’t about one play trying to answer every question, it is about having as many different voices as possible represented over a season of work, whether on stage, or in terms of the creative team and the crew.”
Both are sanguine about the pile of issues in their in-tray, which range from the artistic to the mundanely practical. As an international and national theatre, there is no doubt that the RSC suffers from having poor transport links. “We have a lot of ideas round that,” says Evans, quick as a flash. “All kinds of campaigns, with bus services, with train services, but we also need government support, investment in the area.”
They are bolstered by the knowledge that they have both successfully run regional theatres, and understand what that means in terms of logistics, and of audiences. “There is an audience that gets upset if you don’t perform in period dress, and there’s another that wants to see it in contemporary dress,” says Evans. “You can’t please everyone all the time, but whatever they’re wearing, the show has to be singing because then I don’t think the audience cares what the actors are wearing. They just want the work to be good.”
They talk animatedly about performances at the RSC that inspired them – a visit to see Michael Feast in Murder in the Cathedral for her, watching Desmond Barrit and Haydn Gwynne in Twelfth Night for him. Both are going to be – as Evans puts it – “on the shop floor” in the forthcoming season: Harvey is directing Pericles; Evans is starring in Marlowe’s Edward II.
Enthusiasm for the adventure bubbles up as they talk about their plans. “We want this to be a place where the best artists want to come and make work in a nurturing, exciting environment,” says Evans. In describing her aims, Harvey quotes a Bessie Anderson Stanley poem that her drama teacher at school used to quote. “She – it’s he but she used to change it – has achieved success ‘who has left the world better than she found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul’.”
“Oh, I like that,” says Evans. And with that, they’re off to an afternoon of back-to-back meetings, happy in their shared belief in the power of theatre to change the world.
What should the RSC be in 2024?
We asked six experts for their opinions
Richard Eyre
Artistic director at the National Theatre 1987-97; has directed numerous Shakespeare plays
In the 1980s, the RSC expanded in order to mimic the National Theatre, which had three theatre spaces built into its architectural remit. It suffered from imperial overreach. It developed an appetite to do everything and there was a rash of productions under the RSC trademark that did nothing for the reputation or focus of the company. It started as a festival theatre where it ran a season and you went to Stratford to see the plays because often you couldn’t see them anywhere else. But I do think Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey have made a really intelligent start. They haven’t said we’re doing the comedies, or the histories, or the tragedies; they’re doing a mixed repertoire, or rather a succession of one-off shows, which allows a concentration of the audience.
Brian Cox
Feted for his turn as Logan Roy in Succession, Cox spent three years at the RSC in the 1980s and played a groundbreaking Lear at the National in 1990-91
The strength of the RSC for me, when I was there, was the sense of company. And I think that’s the thing that has to be maintained more than anything else, so that young players can learn from more experienced players. What was so strong about the RSC was that you went there and committed to doing a season. Stratford was the last place in the world I ever wanted to go, but I went because there was a particular crisis in my life and I needed to be somewhere on a constant, regular level. And I had the best time of my life, because of the work and the range of the plays. The company ethic at the RSC should be maintained no matter what, and be an ever-evolving, ever-changing thing.
Vicky Featherstone
Former artistic director, Royal Court, London
Even though there is a singular playwright at the heart of it, the RSC always needs to demonstrate fearless programming. I’ve always wanted the new plays at the RSC to have longer runs, more prominence and more connection beyond Stratford, so I would hope that the new work gets that. I would love to see more playwrights being commissioned to really interrogate our culture. With funding cuts, possibilities for playwrights are quite precarious at the moment, and a commission at the RSC offers a chance to have free rein to write whatever you want.
Some people have expressed disappointment that there isn’t more emphasis on touring in this new season. The thing about touring is it takes an incredibly long time – 18 months minimum – to set it up meaningfully. You can’t just parachute in and then leave. Also the touring infrastructure in this country, because of cuts in local council and Arts Council funding, is really vulnerable. So I would hope that a company like the RSC that’s dynamic and competent in its programming will be able to use its resources to think more about how it could work with theatres outside Stratford and London, and that Daniel and Tamara can build up touring over time.
Suba Das
Director and producer, former AD of Liverpool Everyman
Part of the challenge is that there’s a heritage function attached to Stratford as a place, and it’s about a certain understanding or representation of Englishness that may feel quite alienating to some people in this country. There’s always a tension, I think, between some of the chocolate-box trappings of heritage versus our responsibility as artists handling the work of this legendary man who was deeply invested in the lived experience and the political context of his audiences. I love the fact that Tamara and Daniel are looking at train times, because if you’re seeing an evening show in Stratford, you’ll miss the last train. Experimenting with leaner, quicker performances offers a real opportunity to de-risk that.
I think the RSC engages with audiences phenomenally well, with programmes such as First Encounters which takes productions into schools. What’s wonderful about the announcement is seeing a lot of that experimental work through First Encounters moving more into the main programme.
Thea Sharrock
Film and theatre director and former artistic director of the Southwark Playhouse. Her latest film, Wicked Little Letters, is released on 23 February
If you need to see a Shakespeare play, it’s great that at any moment of the year you can go to Stratford and achieve that. When Peter Hall started the RSC, it was all about Shakespeare, but at the same time he had close working relationships with Beckett and Pinter and he introduced their work alongside all of his Shakespearean productions. I think this is a moment to remember that the RSC can be just as renowned for new work as for Shakespeare and I love how Daniel and Tamara are embracing new work.
Education at the RSC is important, but if a show is really good, it is by nature educative, for whatever age. You’re also teaching people that high standards are really important. That for me is way more important than having an education arm where you do perhaps slightly substandard shows. I want to take my kids to the really good stuff. And if they don’t understand it, but they’re excited, that means they’ll want to go back and they will ultimately understand much more. That for me is the best way to educate.
John McGrath
Artistic director and chief executive of Factory International, overseeing the Manchester International Festival and Aviva Studios
There are three things I would be excited to see the new artistic directors doing. The first, given the role that Shakespeare plays in British society and self-image, would be to look at the ways in which those plays can reflect, question and imagine who we are as a society today. The second area is technology and the experience of Shakespeare’s stories in the mixed reality in which we find ourselves now. Finally, I’d be excited for the RSC to think more about its relationship to poetry and spoken word and how might it relate to the really exciting and diverse range of voices in those fields that we have now in the UK.
Interviews by Killian Fox
