Charles Edward Flower’s Memorial Theatre, 1879, and Elisabeth Scott’s rebuild, 1932.

The company’s story starts with a building in the town where Shakespeare was born. English Wikipedia records theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon long before it: a charitable performance of Othello in 1746 by a Birmingham-based company, raising money to restore Shakespeare’s funerary monument; David Garrick’s Jubilee Pavilion of 1769; and a theatre built in 1827 in the gardens of New Place, since demolished.

The direct ancestor was the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Wikipedia’s article on the company calls it the brainchild of a local brewer, Charles Edward Flower, who gave a site of about two acres beside the River Avon and in 1875 launched an international campaign to build a theatre there; its article on the theatre credits the campaign and donations to Flower and his father, Edward Fordham Flower, owners of a Stratford brewery. The red-brick Victorian Gothic building was designed by Dodgshun and Unsworth. The company article gives the opening as 23 April 1879, with Much Ado About Nothing; the theatre article gives 19 April 1879. A resident New Shakespeare Company developed there from 1919 under William Bridges-Adams, and Wikipedia says the theatre received a royal charter of incorporation in 1925.

On the afternoon of 6 March 1926, as rehearsals for a new season were about to begin, fire broke out, and by the next morning the theatre was a shell. Festivals moved to a converted cinema in the town while money was raised, with donations from the United States. In January 1928, after an open competition, the architect Elisabeth Scott was appointed to design a new theatre; Wikipedia says George Bernard Shaw commented that hers was the only design that showed any theatre sense.

Scott’s brick building opened on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April 1932, on a site next to the old one. Wikipedia says it has Art Deco features, including the staircase and the corridors on either side of the auditorium, and that the surviving remains of the 1879 theatre were rebuilt and joined to it, initially as a conference centre and rehearsal room. The building later came under the direction of Barry Jackson, Anthony Quayle and Glen Byam Shaw, and with minor changes to the stage it stayed in constant use until 2007.

Peter Hall’s permanent company, London homes and new stages.

The company in its present form was Peter Hall’s project. Wikipedia says that in 1959, while still director-designate of the Memorial Theatre, Hall announced that forming a permanent company would be a main objective, and that his first policy statement as director, on 14 January 1960, also proposed a second theatre in London for selected Stratford productions. The Royal Shakespeare Company was formally established on 20 March 1961, with the royal announcement that the Memorial Theatre would be known as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the company as the Royal Shakespeare Company. John Barton, Peter Brook, Michel Saint-Denis and Clifford Williams joined as directors, and John Bury became head of design in 1964.

London came next. Wikipedia says that after a deal with Prince Littler of Associated Theatre Properties, the RSC took the Aldwych Theatre as its London base, redesigning its stage to match the apron stage at Stratford. In 1982 the company moved its London work to the Barbican Theatre and The Pit in the City of London’s Barbican Centre, venues whose design it was closely involved in, and it left the Barbican in 2002.

Stratford gained smaller rooms. The Other Place, planned by the director Buzz Goodbody and opened in 1974 in a converted store, took its name from a line in Hamlet; a purpose-built version by Michael Reardon followed in 1991. The Swan Theatre, also designed by Reardon with a deep thrust stage and galleries, opened on 8 May 1986 inside the shell of the 1879 Memorial Theatre.

Then the main house was rebuilt from the inside. The Royal Shakespeare and Swan theatres closed in 2007; performances moved to the temporary Courtyard Theatre, opened in July 2006, and both houses reopened in November 2010. Rowan Moore, reviewing the work in The Observer on 28 November 2010, explained that Scott’s auditorium had fanned out from a proscenium in imitation of cinema, and that the new one, by Bennetts Associates, has a thrust stage with the audience stacked around it in stalls and galleries, cutting the maximum distance from spectator to stage from 27 metres to 15 metres. He quoted the artistic director Michael Boyd calling it “a one-room space for performing Shakespeare”, reported that the RSC chose the architects for the workshops they ran between architects and theatre people, and described steel and untreated oak inside, an exposed wall of the old building in the foyer and a new 36-metre tower of brick and glass. Queen Elizabeth II formally opened the theatre on 4 March 2011, Wikipedia says.

A theatre, a company and a town.

For an opera house, a concert hall or a theatre, the building is often the logo before any logo is drawn. A roofline, a fly tower or a facade on a riverbank turns up on tickets, in press photographs and in the background of every arrival, and many venue marks are simply a reduction of that outline or of the letters cut into the stone. The rest of the identity lives in print that changes with every season. A season brochure sets the tone for the year ahead, posters and banners name individual productions, and programmes carry cast lists, essays and rehearsal photographs into the auditorium. Each production usually has its own artwork, so the house style is mostly a frame: a grid, a typeface, a place for the venue name and a rule about how the date and the title sit together, while the image inside the frame keeps changing.

Wayfinding is the other permanent layer. Signs to auditoriums, cloakrooms, bars and box offices have to work for people arriving in a hurry, and they stay up long after the posters change. A further complication is the difference between a building and a resident company. One organisation may own the venue while an orchestra, opera company or theatre ensemble performs there under its own name, and some companies tour or move between venues, taking their identity with them. In those cases the building mark and the company mark need to appear side by side without competing. In practice, a performing arts identity is a system of fixed parts and changing parts: the fixed parts must stay recognisable, and the changing parts must leave room for each new production.

A mid-1970s mark, redrawn in 2005 for a year of complete works.

The RSC’s graphic identity is less documented than its buildings. Design Week reported on 31 March 2005 that the company was unveiling a redrawn logo, to be rolled out across all of its design and print material later that year, and that the existing mark had been designed in the mid-1970s; the report did not name a designer for either version, and none is named in the other sources checked. The same report said the RSC was holding a three-way pitch between undisclosed design groups for the identity of a year-long festival of Shakespeare’s complete works, with the chosen consultancy to create a working title and brand architecture, and that the festival would begin in April 2006. Wikipedia confirms that the Complete Works festival began that month, staged with other theatre companies.

The initials do much of the work. The company is widely written as RSC, and its two Stratford houses share the name: the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, abbreviated RST, and the Swan, linked since 2010 by a colonnade. That doubling of venue and company under one name goes back to the 1961 announcement, which renamed the theatre and the company at the same moment.

Like other theatres, the company now also reaches audiences through screens. Wikipedia says Live from Stratford-upon-Avon, a project to broadcast productions to cinemas and stream them into schools, was announced in May 2013 and began that November with Richard II, starring David Tennant. In 2008 the company launched a manifesto called Stand up for Shakespeare for children and young people, with three tenets — “Do It on Your Feet, See It Live, Start It Earlier” — that Wikipedia says underpin its education work.

Leadership has changed several times since Hall. Trevor Nunn, Terry Hands, Adrian Noble, Michael Boyd and Gregory Doran led the company in turn, and Wikipedia says Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey became joint artistic directors from June 2023, announcing their first season on 16 January 2024. For a design guide, the Royal Shakespeare Company shows how a company named after a playwright and housed in a listed riverside building can rest its identity on a short set of initials and a building it keeps renewing; compare the National Theatre in London and the Royal Academy of Arts. For this guide we use Avon brick red, deco brass and untreated oak with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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