THE ROYAL Shakespeare Company remains focused on giving young and old an ‘amazing’ experience of Shakespeare.
Artistic director Gregory Doran and executive director Catherine Mallyon issued a joint statement reflecting on the past 12 months following the company’s AGM in Stratford.
“We believe that Shakespeare is for everyone, and we want people of all ages to develop a life-long relationship with Shakespeare and live theatre. We aim to build a nation of Shakespeare and theatre lovers by creating opportunities for people to have amazing experiences of Shakespeare’s plays and of great theatre.
“Our productions on stage, cinema screenings, free schools’ screenings and events, UK and international tours, exhibitions and our deep-rooted education work are some of the ways in which we do this. We worked with just over 500 actors last year, staged 28 productions and co-productions and reached 534,374 young people through our education activity across the country.
“We make amazing things happen through our partnership working, and partnerships make it possible to achieve all that we do. Our 11 long-term partner theatres, 246 Associate Schools, and 518 young Shakespeare Ambassadors are integral to what we do. Together we want everybody to have the opportunity to feel the transformative power of theatre and Shakespeare.
“As a charity we rely on our many funders and supporters. We would like to thank them and our theatre and education partners across the country, our creative teams, and every one of our colleagues, for making everything the RSC achieves possible.”
The company’s efforts in recent years to give young people a positive first encounter with Shakespeare continued and The RSC Education programme reached some 535,000 aged three to 25. More than 8,000 BP £5 tickets were also issued to young people aged 16 to 25.
During the past year more than a million visits were made to the RSC’s Stratford theatres. Worldwide the company issued 1.7million tickets.
Four productions – Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Troilus and Cressida – were screened globally to a combined audience of nearly 118,000, including in China.
And the Matilda The Musical bandwagon kept rolling. The company’s most successful ever production has won 98 international awards and been seen by 9million people worldwide. It also saw the first foreign language production of the show in South Korea.
The charity’s total income was £86.44million – more than 80 per cent of which was self-generated through the likes of box office sales, commercial trading and fund-raising.
Box Office revenue totalled £53.3million (6 per cent of income) and trading income was £10.4million.
Annual fund-raising income increased to £4.17million, and in addition the company’s Stitch In Time fund-raising campaign hit its raise £3.44million target towards the restoration and redevelopment of the RSC Costume Workshop in Stratford.
