Helen Mirren speaking at the event, © Matt Alexander for PA Media Assignments
This morning, the RSC and the Foyle Foundation launched the RSC Shakespeare Curriculum.
A new and innovative endeavour allows teachers and students to access an online portal and see Shakespeare through an actor in a rehearsal room lens. It has been years in the making and is supported by key actors including Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, and Adjoa Andoh.
At today’s launch at Middle Temple Hall, where the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place in 1602, Mirren and McKellen were among key speakers.
Mirren spoke out to the students in the room who were the first to pilot the platform. Learning that the youngest is 14, she remembered being that age and Lady Chatterley’s Lover being a banned text, saying: “So of course, being a 14-year-old, all we wanted to read was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
When she eventually got a copy of it, she recalled, with a laugh, the pages being torn. “It was very exciting having this banned thing in my hand.”
Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen at the launch of the RSC Shakespeare Curriculum, © Matt Alexander for PA Media Assignments
“Shakespeare, I didn’t care about at all. I was allowed to read Shakespeare. But from that point on, I thought it would kind of be brilliant to ban Shakespeare for anyone below the age of 20.”
She suggested that, where possible, a young person’s first experience of Shakespeare should be in a theatre, where it’s ”live and it’s funny and it’s sexy and then they’d fall in love with Shakespeare”, an experience she had as a young teen seeing Hamlet.
McKellen added: “I always thought that Shakespeare didn’t belong in a classroom,” explaining he was against the idea of our national hero and celebrated Englishman (one he is grateful is a playwright, of all things) to be governed and taught only to “make [people] feel patriotic.”
He said: “After 60 or 70 years of acting Shakespeare, it is difficult and I still haven’t figured out how to do it.”
Adjoa Andoh at the launch of the RSC Shakespeare Curriculum, © Matt Alexander for PA
Therefore, he was “comforted” by the RSC Curriculum and reminisced about visiting the Wigan Little Theatre with his sister for his first introduction to Macbeth.
Finally, McKellen remembers meeting a young Daniel Evans at the stage door at the National Theatre, where the teen told him that one day he’d be part of a Welsh national theatre. How befitting that his commitment to the arts has now extended to being co-artistic director of the RSC and launching this new curriculum with the Foyle Foundation.
