Qualla: Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Royal Shakespeare Theatre: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aniacra, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the night of 6 March 1926, the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre on the banks of the Avon burned to the ground. George Bernard Shaw famously sent a telegram of congratulation -- he had loathed the building's Victorian Gothic excess and considered the fire an aesthetic improvement. The townspeople of Stratford-upon-Avon did not see it that way. They had spent half a century building Shakespeare a permanent home, brick by red brick, with money raised by a local brewer who believed his hometown owed its most famous son a stage. What rose from those ashes, six years later, became the first major British building designed by a woman -- and a century after its predecessor went up in smoke, that 1932 theatre is still the beating heart of the world's most famous Shakespeare company.

Image: Aniacra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Royal Shakespeare Theatre: A Brewer's Crusade

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stowell, CC BY-SA 2.0. The campaign began in 1864, the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, when Stratford had nothing more permanent to offer pilgrims than a few half-timbered houses and a country churchyard. Edward Fordham Flower and his son Charles Edward Flower, who ran the local bre...

Image: David Stowell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Shakespeare Theatre: Elisabeth Scott's Quiet Revolution

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The international competition to design the replacement drew seventy-one entries. The winner, announced in 1928, stunned the architectural establishment: Elisabeth Scott, a thirty-year-old great-niece of Sir George Gilbert Scott, became the first woman to win a major British publ...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Royal Shakespeare Theatre: The Transformation

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve F, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the early 2000s, the proscenium-arch auditorium Scott had designed felt increasingly remote from contemporary theatre. Actors stood behind a picture frame; audiences sat in rows that stretched too far back for the kind of intimacy Shakespeare's plays demand. So the RSC closed ...

Image: Steve F | CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Shakespeare Theatre: What Rises Above the Avon

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. The transformed building gave Stratford something the old theatre never had: a tower. A thirty-six metre column rises from the riverside, with a viewing platform at thirty-two metres that lifts you above the medieval roofline and across the water meadows toward Holy Trinity Churc...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Royal Shakespeare Theatre: The Bardolaters Still Come

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Deirdre O'Neill, CC BY-SA 2.0. Roughly 2.5 million people visit Stratford every year, and a sizeable share of them come specifically for the theatre Charles Flower built. The 1,040-seat auditorium fills nightly through the season. Tickets for the major productions sell out months in advance. The actors who wor...

Image: Deirdre O'Neill | CC BY-SA 2.0