Comedy season just as they like it (From Tewkesbury Admag)

Comedy season just as they like it

THE RSC has just announced its explosive Stratford 2005 Festival Season.

Theatregoers can look forward to seeing four Shakespeare comedies performed in repertoire in the RST - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It - while in the Swan theatre, Gunpowder will be the title of a season of little known Jacobean and Elizabethan political drama celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. This will culminate in a specially commissioned play by Frank McGuinness.

And at The Other Place, two new plays by leading British playwrights Zinnie Harris and David Greig will be exploring responses to conflict.

The season will be closing this time next year with the second New Work Festival.

Launching the plans for the season, artistic director Michael Boyd, after his first year in the job, has pledged his commitment to the ensemble, training and new work. He aims to continue capitalising on the RSC's ability to explore big themes and bold ideas.

Boyd's first season closes with the return of Beauty and the Beast in a new version for Christmas.

He said: "This has been the first year steering the company in a new direction. As well as clearing the deficit from £2.8million to under half a million, the plays have outperformed any previous festival season at the box office."

"The adventurous Spanish Golden Age Season is more than matching our Jacobean Season of two years ago. And we have recommissioned The Other Place for this year's New Work Festival and a season of new plays next summer.

"Pitched against contemporary events, our exploration of tragedy has been about hope as much as horror. Similarly, our comedies season is not just about laughter, but the yearning for harmony and reconciliation which lies at the heart of Shakespeare's great comedies.

"Shakespeare and his contemporaries were dramatists to England's most conflicted times. Four hundred years on from the Gunpowder Plot and three years on from 9/11 we're trying to throw new light on the schism in our own world with plays from both then and now.