Royal Shakespeare Company Reveals Summer 2025 Season Featuring THE BFG and More

Details have been announced for the RSC's Summer 2025 season and upcoming festive family show, The BFG. This big, friendly production from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Chichester Festival Theatre and the Roald Dahl Story Company, is adapted by Tom Wells and directed by RSC Co-Artistic Director Daniel Evans in his directorial debut for the Company. 

 

Joining the previously announced Hamlet Hail to the Thief and 4.48 Psychosis are five new Shakespeare productions directed by Joanna Bowman, Emily Burns, Yaël Farber, Michael Longhurst and Max Webster, a new version of W. Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife, which will see Olivier Award-winning playwright Laura Wade re-unite with Co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey, the European premiere of Fat Ham by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames, and nationwide tours of Rupert Goold's Hamlet and First Encounters: King Lear. 

 

The Summer season will welcome internationally-renowned acting talent to Stratford-upon-Avon – including returning artists Simon Russell Beale and Freema Agyeman with Rose Leslie and Nick Blood making their RSC debuts. 

 

Across the season, the RSC will celebrate creative partnerships with Factory International, The Public Theater New York and The Royal Court Theatre. The Company will also step into new spheres of storytelling, collaborating with Brooklyn-based creative studio iNK Stories in a groundbreaking co-production combining Shakespeare and commercial video game production.   

 

Audiences of all ages will have the opportunity to come together to watch, make and explore, with highlights including an 80-minute staging of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Tim Crouch's I, Peaseblossom, his hit adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; a programme of interactive theatre workshops, free drop-in activities, family theatre trails, and the return of the RSC's popular acting-based Summer schools for ages 8-14 and 18-25.  

Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans said, “Over the last twelve months, our guiding principle as Co-Artistic Directors has been to seek out the most exciting directors, writers and actors working in the UK and internationally, and ask them which stories they feel a passionate desire to tell.  

 

“Our 2025/26 season will bring together an international roster of creative talent, where the works of William Shakespeare stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the most compelling voices in modern playwriting, from Olivier Award-winning playwright Laura Wade to the late, great Sarah Kane and the Pulitzer Prize-winning James Ijames. And then there's Roald Dahl, one of our greatest storytellers and children's authors, whose 1982 novel The BFG will be the inspiration for our magical festive family show in 2025, newly adapted for the stage by Tom Wells. 

 

“Alongside five new productions from the pen of our house playwright, directed by  Joanna Bowman, Emily Burns, Yaël Farber, Michael Longhurst and Max Webster, we will also celebrate the diverse ways in which Shakespeare's characters and stories continue to prove fertile ground for re-invention and re-discovery, with the world premiere of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a frenetic distillation of the Hamlet story, set alongside the soundtrack of Radiohead's seminal album, and the European premiere of James Ijames' tragi-comic family drama, Fat Ham. We're even taking our first foray into the world of gaming with Lili, a powerful, contemporary reimagining of Shakespeare's Macbeth set in modern Iran, currently in development for 2026.” 

ROYAL SHAKESPEARE THEATRE:   

• Director Michael Longhurst kicks off the season with a new staging of Shakespeare’s original rom-com, Much Ado About Nothing, set in the glossy world of professional football in a new production featuring Freema Agyeman as Beatrice and Nick Blood as Benedick 

  

• Shakespeare’s great tragedy and Radiohead’s seminal album collide in the world premiere of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, adapted by Christine Jones with Steven Hoggett with music by Radiohead and Orchestrations by Thom Yorke 

  

• Yaël Farber makes her RSC debut with Shakespeare's enigmatic story of love, loss and rebirth, The Winter’s Tale 

  

• Emily Burns returns to direct a new staging of William Shakespeare’s razor-sharp examination of hypocrisy and corruption, Measure for Measure, following her acclaimed RSC debut in 2024 with Love’s Labour’s Lost 

  

• A Royal Shakespeare Company, Chichester Festival Theatre and Roald Dahl Story Company production, Roald Dahl’s unforgettable story comes to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage in Tom Wells’ magical new adaptation of The BFG, directed by RSC Co-Artistic Director Daniel Evans 

  

SWAN THEATRE:   

• Olivier and Tony Award-winning actor Simon Russell Beale returns to the RSC alongside Associate Artist Emma Fielding and Natey Jones in a new production of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, directed by Max Webster, whose recent credits include The Importance of Being Earnest at The National Theatre and Macbeth at The Donmar Warehouse 

• Rose Leslie stars in a sparkling new version of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife, adapted by Olivier Award-winning playwright Laura Wade and directed by Co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey 

• Originally produced Off-Broadway by The Public Theater and National Black Theatre, James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fat Ham makes its European premiere with original direction by Saheem Ali, directed for the Swan Theatre by Sideeq Heard 

• Multi award-winning writer and performer Tim Crouch presents his magical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream: I, Peaseblossom  

• Richard Nelson’s moving and compelling one-man play, An Actor Convalescing in Devon, visits the Swan Theatre with RSC Associate Artist Paul Jesson 

THE OTHER PLACE 

• 4.48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane’s final masterpiece, returns 25 years on in a new co-production with The Royal Court Theatre reuniting the entire original cast and creative team. Directed by the award-winning James Macdonald with Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter reprising their roles 

• Joanna Bowman directs a new 80-minute version of Shakespeare’s gloriously silly comedy of love and friendship, The Two Gentlemen of Verona 

  

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