Latest News: Royal Shakespeare Company Announces Summer 2025 Season And Big Friendly Family Show
The RSC’s Summer 2025 season and upcoming festive family show has been announced.
The BFG, this big, friendly production from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Chichester Festival Theatre and the Roald Dahl Story Company, is adapted by Tom Wells and directed by RSC Co-Artistic Director Daniel Evans in his directorial debut for the Company.
Joining the previously announced Hamlet Hail to the Thief and 4.48 Psychosis are five new Shakespeare productions directed by Joanna Bowman, Emily Burns, Yaël Farber, Michael Longhurst and Max Webster, a new version of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife, which will see Olivier Award-winning playwright Laura Wade re-unite with Co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey, the European premiere of Fat Ham by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames, and nationwide tours of Rupert Goold’s Hamlet and First Encounters: King Lear.
The Summer season will welcome internationally-renowned acting talent to Stratford-upon-Avon – including returning artists Simon Russell Beale and Freema Agyeman with Rose Leslie and Nick Blood making their RSC debuts.
Across the season, the RSC will celebrate creative partnerships with Factory International, The Public Theater New York and the Royal Court Theatre. The Company will also step into new spheres of storytelling, collaborating with Brooklyn-based creative studio iNK Stories in a groundbreaking co-production combining Shakespeare and commercial video game production.
Audiences of all ages will have the opportunity to come together to watch, make and explore, with highlights including an 80-minute staging of Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Tim Crouch’s I, Peaseblossom, his hit adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream; a programme of interactive theatre workshops, free drop-in activities, family theatre trails, and the return of the RSC’s popular acting-based Summer schools for ages 8-14 and 18-25.
Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans said:
“Over the last twelve months, our guiding principle as Co-Artistic Directors has been to seek out the most exciting directors, writers and actors working in the UK and internationally, and ask them which stories they feel a passionate desire to tell.
“Our 2025/26 season will bring together an international roster of creative talent, where the works of William Shakespeare stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the most compelling voices in modern playwriting, from Olivier Award-winning playwright Laura Wade to the late, great Sarah Kane and the Pulitzer Prize-winning James Ijames. And then there’s Roald Dahl, one of our greatest storytellers and children’s authors, whose 1982 novel The BFG will be the inspiration for our magical festive family show in 2025, newly adapted for the stage by Tom Wells.
“Alongside five new productions from the pen of our house playwright, directed by Joanna Bowman, Emily Burns, Yaël Farber, Michael Longhurst and Max Webster, we will also celebrate the diverse ways in which Shakespeare’s characters and stories continue to prove fertile ground for re-invention and re-discovery, with the world premiere of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a frenetic distillation of the Hamlet story, set alongside the soundtrack of Radiohead’s seminal album, and the European premiere of James Ijames’ tragi-comic family drama, Fat Ham. We’re even taking our first foray into the world of gaming with Lili, a powerful, contemporary reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in modern Iran, currently in development for 2026.”
