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Post by oxfordsimon on Aug 4, 2023 13:45:54 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Aug 4, 2023 15:45:39 GMT
Sad news just read this on WhatsOnStage. He was no real great age and you still have to think he had a lot more to give to theatre. Sir Michael perhaps did his best RSC directing when he was an associate but as AD he had to battle a huge deficit and did the complete works festival.
Also he was a fine Administrator overseeing the temporary home at the Courtyard as well as guiding the RSC when it moved back into the renovated theatre. If anything he perhaps directed a bit less than I felt he should in his last years as AD but if he was busy with overseeing all the relocation work or decided to delegate to his assistant ADs or bring in the right outside directors than that can equally be a sign of a generous and giving AD.
Our thoughts are with Sir Michael's family and it is sad for the RSC having lost Sir Antony Sher under two years ago too.
Hopefully a fitting memorial or part of one of the buildings could be named in Sir Michael's memory.
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2,761 posts
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Post by n1david on Aug 4, 2023 16:14:05 GMT
Very sad. I didn't see much of his work at the RSC but he was AD of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow when I was a student there and I saw loads of stuff. In his early days it was still a club so it could put on stuff that Glasgow City Council didn't approve of. It put on a huge variety of work, from very populist stuff (like the Victor & Barry pantomimes starring Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson) to the very obscure - I went to see nearly everything. He was always around in the cafe/bar and because it was a daytime hangout for me between lectures I got on nodding terms with him. Not a great anecdote I know but I was so pleased when he got the RSC job and he seems to have made a huge success of it. I am sorry he has gone so soon, he had so much more to give.
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3,485 posts
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Post by ceebee on Aug 4, 2023 17:30:28 GMT
I enjoyed his discussion with Greg Doran as part of the RSC's covid offering, and also enjoyed his previous work as a director for them. He struck me as a very intelligent and deep-thinking man.
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Post by Jan on Aug 4, 2023 18:17:44 GMT
Oh. That is quite a shock. I didn’t realise he was that old, but as I saw one of his first Shakespeare productions, Othello in 1984, I suppose he was. His RSC History cycle was one of the landmark productions in the history of the RSC. He also directed some outstanding one-off productions, I remember Midsummer Night’s Dream and John Ford’s The Broken Heart. On the other hand as AD his conversion of the RST to a thrust stage was a historic mistake.
But leaving all that aside, his small scale production of Troilus and Cressida set in 1930’s Belfast was a work of absolute genius and one of my top 5 productions of all time.
Jesu, the days that we have seen.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 4, 2023 21:54:55 GMT
I just wish I'd seen some of his earlier RSC offerings as they seem to have been some of his finest works before he became more selective about what he directed later in his AD run.
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Post by Jan on Aug 6, 2023 12:50:52 GMT
Also worth mentioning the Complete Works Festival which Michael Boyd devised where the RSC and invited companies from UK and around the world performed all 37 plays in the canon in Stratford in a 12 month period. The difference in ambition between that and what came after is striking.
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