Magical theatre box

The story so far of the RSC’s Complete Works marathon has been largely that of performances, some wonderfully rich and strange, coming in from abroad. Unable to spend an entire summer camped out in Stratford, I have still to catch up with some of the reputedly stronger offerings by the home team. But even the prospect of having to battle for hot water and breakfast at one of Stratford’s more reputable hotels couldn’t keep me from the inauguration of the new Courtyard Theatre with Michael Boyd’s Henry VI trilogy, or from Patrick Stewart as Prospero in the unsatisfactory cinematic 1930s theatre which is shortly to be disembowelled (not before time) and reconstructed.

The Courtyard Theatre is a crucial transitional step. Built at a cost of £6 million (or the price of Sir Paul and Lady McCartney’s disputed villa in St John’s Wood), it’s to house the RSC while the old theatre and the (thankfully largely unaffected) Swan become a building site. Intended as no more than temporary, the Courtyard is highly significant as a prototype for the reborn theatre on the river. Let it be said at once that the relationship of the audience to the stage in the 1,000-seater Courtyard is so perfect that the RSC will be lucky indeed if it is able to build a better auditorium just down the road.

Erected inside a brutalist cube of rusting steel sections that looks as though it might house missiles or nuclear waste, an elegantly proportioned horseshoe of stalls and twin-gallery seating wraps around a large thrust stage. As at the Swan, the actors make much use of the gangways through the stalls, to say nothing of rope, trapeze and ladder-work invited by the dizzying Big Top space above the stage.