The RSC is one of the world's best-known theatre companies. Every year the Company plays to over 800,000 theatregoers at 2000 performances staged across the world. The RSC plays throughout the year at its home in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born and died. The Company also performs regularly in London and at an annual RSC residency in Newcastle Upon Tyne. In addition, over 50 weeks of UK and international touring take place, including residencies with universities and performing centres in the United States.

The Company's mission is to keep in touch with Shakespeare as a contemporary, but also to keep modern audiences, artists and writers in touch with Shakespeare. The Company's repertoire also includes other Renaissance dramatists, and the work of international and contemporary writers.

The aim is to give as many people as possible, from all walks of life, a richer and fuller understanding of theatre. Through education and outreach programmes the RSC continually strives to engage people with the experience of live performance. The RSC today is still at the heart an ensemble company. Everyone in the Company, from directors, actors and writers to production, administrative, technical and workshop staff, all collaborate in the RSC distinctive and unmistakable approach to theatre.

Michael Boyd's New Vision

Michael Boyd became Artistic Director of the RSC in April 2003. Under his leadership he is re-committing the Company to a dedicated core ensemble of actors at the heart of the RSC. The move is designed to increase opportunities for training and experiment and sees actors in the core ensemble rehearsing twice as long as is usual in the UK. They spend dedicated 'class' time studying voice, movement and Shakespeare's language. Eventually, more than half the 36 actors contracted for the ensemble are expected to continue with the company, providing a unique opportunity in the UK for the sustained development and training of actors.

Boyd's Artistic Directorship is seeing the renewal of the Company's commitment to the relationship between new work and Shakespeare. The first New Work Festival took place in September 2004, and provided a fresh platform in the UK for premieres of new plays, devised work, as well as experimental productions of Shakespeare's work. The two-week Festival, held annually in Stratford at the end of the summer season, sees productions play across all the Company's stages. The aim is to put the spirit of experimentation and enquiry back at the heart of the RSC.

As a large company the RSC is able to paint on a large canvas, working with big ideas in depth over a longer period than is possible for most theatre companies. This gives the Company a responsibility to experiment and to take risks. There is a need to reassert people's faith in theatre as a quintessentially collaborative art form, an ensemble where the whole can be so much bigger than the sum of its parts.

The RSC has always had a reputation as somewhere where actors cut their teeth. Boyd's aim is to transform the experience of those working at the RSC, with actors, at every stage in their careers, able to come to the Company and give performances of which they did not know they were capable.