The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades

by Sally Beauman

Traces the development of the Royal Shakespeare Company from its opening in 1879 to the present and examines its productions of the classic plays of Shakespeare

Hardcover

First published August 12, 1982

About the author

aka Vanessa James

Sally Kinsey-Miles graduated from Girton College, Cambridge (MA in English Literature) She married Christopher Beauman an economist. After graduating, she moved with her husband to the USA, where she lived for three years, first in Washington DC, then New York, and travelled extensively. She began her career as a journalist in America, joining the staff of the newly launched New York magazine, of which she became associate editor, and continued to write for it after her return to England. Interviewed Alan Howard for the Telegraph Magazine in 1970 in an article called 'A Fellow of Most Excellent Fancy'. (Daily Telegraph Supplement, May 29th.) Apparently a very long interview. The following year they met again, and the rest is history. After a long partnership Sally and Alan married in 2004. She has one son, James, and one grandchild.

Sally had a distinguished career as a journalist and critic, winning the Catherine Pakenham Award for her writing, and becoming the youngest-ever editor of Queen magazine (now Harper’s & Queen). She has contributed to many leading newspapers and magazines in both the UK and the USA, including the Daily Telegraph ( from 1970-73 and 1976-8 she was Arts Editor of the Sunday Telegraph Magazine), the Sunday Times, Observer, Vogue, the New York Times and the New Yorker. She also wrote nine Mills & Boon romances under the pseudonym Vanessa James, before publishing her block-buster novel Destiny in 1987 under her real name. It was her article about Daphne du Maurier, commissioned by Tina Brown, and published in The New Yorker in November 1993, which first gave her the idea for writing Rebecca de Winter’s version of events at Manderley – an idea that subsequently became the novel, Rebecca’s Tale. In 2000 she was one of the Whitbread Prize judges for the best novel category.

Reviews

[Stuart Ian Burns]

One of those books which is so readable there's a loss when it inevitably ends, especially since, having been published in 1982, it unavoidably misses out on covering another forty-years of history. More than simply the theatrical history of what appeared on stage, Sally Beauman's RSC: A History in Ten Decades instead investigates the origins of the RSC, from its original scrappy week long annual event to commemorate Shakespeare (which for years didn't even mount a production), through the building of its various venues, its many directors, the financial wrangling between the board of directors and then the arts council, the rivalry with the National Theatre and how its on stage fortunes have been dictated by critical and academic tastes.

Despite her own association with the company (at time of writing she'd been married to one of its key actors Alan Howard for ten years), Beauman is unafraid to editorialise on the shortcomings of its key players, the text is incredibly gossipy, and the architecture of the auditoriums. At its peak, the RSC was running six or seven different performance spaces between Stratford and London with numerous seasons of plays and transfers and if nothing else, the book has helped me to understand the provenance of the various programmes I've been collecting lately. The moment when the book stops, just on the eve of The Barbican opening feels like an extremely exciting time as the company's reputation had reached one of its many zeniths.

You can smell the spaces and rehearsal rooms. When Trevor Nunn succeeded Peter Hall, he wanted to create a more professional almost monastic atmosphere and to that end replaced the stage cloth, the large sheet in the rehearsal room which represented the acting space. Over the years it had become incredibly dirty and so it was ripped out and replaced with a brand new, bright white fabric and the rule was that it had to remain that way, whatever the cost, smoking, food, drink and shoes banned from the space and it remained that way through all of his rehearsals. Then John Barton took over to rehearse his Twelfth Night and when Nunn returned afterward the sheet was as dirty and filled with cigarette burns as its predecessor. He realised that some things couldn't be changed.

[Dominic H · Rating 4 out of 5]

This history was published in 1982, right at what I described in my review of 'The Wars of the Roses' scripts the apogee of the RSC's achievements. It's my thesis that the company has never again approached the level of achievements attained from 1975-82, but that's for another day and book. This book almost by default has become the de facto reference even in 2024. The new co-artistic directors of the RSC, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans mentioned it as forming part of their introduction. And it's not at all bad. Sally Beauman was a gifted writer, whose career took a rather different direction from theatre historian after this book. She tells an interesting story clearly and objectively (she was married to one of the leading actors if not the leading actor of the golden period referred to). I would have preferred much more on the RSC itself (only the last quarter or so of the book is devoted to post 1960 after the RSC was formed) less of the 1960s and 1970s RSC/National politics and more detail on more of the plays produced, but nevertheless I enjoyed this book a lot.