The Drunks; The Grain Store
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Sooner or later RSC chief Michael Boyd was going to make a Stratford move on his Russian background. Trained in Moscow at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre (1979–80), Boyd got used to KGB agents sitting in on his rehearsals. It’s a tribute to the best of Russian theatre that the authorities have always needed to keep an eye on it. Always, and quite rightly, keen to extend the RSC’s frontiers beyond the Shakespearean canon, Boyd has just launched ‘Revolutions: an exploration of a new generation of post-Soviet theatre’.
The programme has already featured five play readings that included ‘a buoyant monologue about life in the Russian Navy and the best way to cook a dog’, and ‘a beautiful and cinematic epic’ in which a family tragedy ‘forces five-year-old Alina to live near a disused railway line with her Aunt Irma’.
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