The other day on Radio Four David Hare set one of his namesakes running when he remarked that the RSC was ‘completely irrelevant to the theatrical life of the country’. Well, certainly in so far as it’s a company dedicated to the Swan of Avon rather than the Bard of Hampstead. Is it self-evident that a play by Hare about the Middle East is a more useful contribution to debate, theatrical or otherwise, about that subject than a play by Shakespeare about the Wars of the Roses?
The RSC is no stranger to the slippery notion of relevance, though more wisely circumspect than Hare. Hence, at least in part, the rationale for its ongoing ‘Gunpowder’ season of plays, written around 1605, by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Whether the responses of Massinger, Jonson and others to the dangers of their time offer any clues to the solution of present troubles is an open question, but their plays are very well worth exploring and, you would have thought, far from ‘irrelevant’ to the theatrical life of the nation.
First performed in the early months of James I’s reign, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus: His Fall seems to have gone more or less missing from the stage for some 400 years.
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