Bloomsbury Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company

Co-authored by the resident dramaturg and a long-time scholarly consultant, The Shakespeare Theatre Company chronicles how a small repertory troupe at the Folger Theatre on Capitol Hill became an internationally renowned company performing in a lavish, multi-venue performing arts center in downtown Washington, D.C. The artistic vision and business acumen of Michael Kahn, the founding Artistic Director, largely catalyzed this transformation, but so too did the forces of neoliberalism and, more recently, globalization and new media. Accordingly, this book not only examines directorial decision-making but also three decades of social and economic change in the nation’s capital, such as the complexities of gentrification to the arts policies of successive administrations. In addition to discussions of directorial practice, this book examines the ambivalence of American theatre artists toward their British cultural inheritance. Analyses of representative productions and interviews with Kahn and his British successor, Simon Godwin, illuminate this complex relationship: one that aspires to a cosmopolitan Anglophilia while simultaneously positioning classically trained American actors as worthy rivals to their counterparts at the RSC and the National Theatre of Great Britain.