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Starting in March next year, Sir Peter will
present 12 plays in repertory over a 40-week season. Six will be classics and
six will be new plays by young playwrights, bringing back the concept of
repertory which has largely disappeared from British theatre. This will mean
that the entire company will appear in different productions; there will be
only an hour needed to change the sets from one production to another and the
theatre will never have to go dark for days on end for technical rehearsals as
still happens at the big subsidised theatres.
The National and RSC operate repertory-based
systems, but do not involve the entire companies in casting across plays.
Among those joining Sir Peter will be Alan
Howard, currently starring in the Oedipus plays at the National, Felicity
Kendal, Geraldine McEwan and the former RSC leading actors Ben Kingsley and
Michael Pennington. Alan Howard will play King Lear for the first time, and it
will be the first time Sir Peter has directed it.
The Old Vic, which was home to the National
Theatre in the Sixties, has failed to have consistent success in recent years
despite lavish refurbishment by its Canadian father-and-son owners, Ed and
David Mirvisch. The Mirvisches have told Sir Peter that if he makes a profit he
can carry on indefinitely, but if he fails to attract the necessary audiences
of 65 per cent of capacity, they will close the venture down. Also backing the
project financially is the West End producer Bill Kenwright.
Felicity Kendal said yesterday: "I have decided
to come here because a repertory theatre company is a theatre I understand and
love most. To work with other actors in two or three plays is exciting and I
think audiences find it exciting too."
Sir Peter denied that he was setting up a "mini
National Theatre", but he said: "We're all in competition with each other. It's
rather wonderful having spent all my life in the RSC and National Theatre to
have a chance to do it again on a smaller scale. I want to do new plays, I want
to run a theatre which is hyperactive."
Andrew Leigh, general manager of the Old Vic,
said he had achieved agreement with the actors' union Equity and the backstage
workers' union Bectu for Sunday working. No one would have to work more than
six days a week, he said.
Among the classics he is presenting, Sir Peter
will direct Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot which he premièred
in 1955. It will star Alan Howard and Michael Pennington [sic]*. Felicity
Kendal will appear in Chekhov's The Seagull, Harley Granville-Barker's
Waste and Sir John Vanburgh's The Provok'd Wife.
* Ben Kingsley
David Lister
The Independent, 29.11.96
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