The day I crossed the boards at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

This is me directly outside the door of the RSC. The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon. The RSC is a theatre company and they show Shakespeare plays and other plays as well.
I visited on the day of Shakespeare’s birthday and he would have been 460 years old!
Everyone crosses the boards to get into the theatre. You have to cross the boards to get into the RSC because the boards came from the original RST stage.

The Swan Theatre

The RST is the Royal Shakepeare Theatre, it has two theatres. One is called the Swan Theatre.
The Swan is the oldest theatre. It was rebuilt after it burnt down. It now has a thrust stage, that’s a stage that juts into the audience so that they are almost all around it on all three sides.
There are 500 seats.

William Shakespeare Lego

This image of Shakespeare is pixellated because it’s is made out of 3650 1×1 lego bricks.
And one of his eyes contain ten lego bricks.
The picture shows how big William Shakespeare is compared to me. It is larger than life-size.
This is on the first floor next to the dressing up wardrobe.
It was made by the public by giving everyone a leaflet with a photo on it and they had to put at least one lego brick onto it from a bowl. It is not glued, they are all just placed. I think that it is amazing that everyone in Stratford was sensible about it.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos because there was an understudy rehearsal and they didn’t want flashes to obscure the scene for the actors/understudies. An understudy rehearsal is when actors who don’t play that part practice in case the actor that does can’t make it.
It used to be a curtained stage and this was a called a two-room theatre. Now it is a thrust stage.

This theatre was rebuilt three times. When it was rebuilt the architect and designers left three seats very high up on the old wall and turned the new stage into a thrust stage.
The new theatre was built inside the old one. You can see the staircase from the old theatre in the wall.

If you look at old photos of actors you see that they are caked in make-up so that the people at the top could see their facial expressions. I think they had to shout too.

Dressing Up Box

There was a very good dressing up box there. I was trying to get one of the goggles to look up and the other look down.

The Fountain

This is on the ground floor and is blocked because there is a penny in the place where it sprays out the water. Shakespeare is watching everyone in that room.

The Running Wardrobe

This is a wardrobe that you can get lost in. It is in between the Swan and RST and actors use it to clean, dry and mend their costumes for their plays.
If the costume is too delicate then it goes in an Ozone cabinet which blasts the clothes with ozone to clean them.

Rowan said: “The tour was excellent and some parts were particularly interesting. I liked the Swan Theatre the best because it was the oldest theatre and was the stone part of the building and stage were original .”

PLEASE NOTE: Photos taken by Rowan Taylor-Ramsay, except the ones taken by mum.