The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is to complete a hat-trick of Hamlets with another version of the play unveiled as part of its spring 2025 programme.
James Ijames’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, Fat Ham, is not a straightforward adaptation of the Shakespeare play, but rather a production that “both echoes Hamlet and finds a language beyond it” in the words of the New York Times, setting the action at a barbecue held by the family of a Black queer man. It will run at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 15 August to 13 September.
The RSC has already announced two versions of the Shakespeare play. The first, which opens on 8 February, will see Rupert Goold, who was recently named as the new director of the Old Vic, direct the story of grief and family dysfunction in the Danish royal court.
The second is a combination of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief album and the play, which will open at Aviva Studios, Manchester, from 27 April to 18 May before moving to the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 4-28 June.
The Radiohead frontman, Thom Yorke, has reworked the band’s critically acclaimed album into a deconstructed score that “illuminates the text” and is performed by live musicians.
The RSC will also host a co-production of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, alongside the Roald Dahl Story Company and the Chichester Festival theatre, with the RSC co-artistic director, Daniel Evans, making his directorial debut at the theatre.
Adapted by Tom Wells of Jumpers for Goalposts and The Kitchen Sink fame, it will open in Stratford-upon-Avon on 25 November and run until 31 January 2026 before transferring to Chichester on 16 March 2026, where it will run until 12 April.
The production is the latest big Roald Dahl adaptation, after the National Theatre’s Witches and the Enormous Crocodile at Leeds Playhouse, and was described as “a play with music, rather than a musical”.
Other highlights from the season include the Game of Thrones actor Rose Leslie making her debut in The Constant Wife, which has been adapted by Laura Wade and will be directed by RSC co-artistic director Tamara Harvey.
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Simon Russell Beale will return to the RSC for the first time since 2016 with his take on Titus Andronicus, which comes a couple of years after Jude Christian’s version shocked audiences at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2023.
Meanwhile, a production of Shakespeare’s original romcom, Much Ado About Nothing, will be directed by Michael Longhurst and set in the glossy world of professional football. And Yaël Farber, who has previously directed Macbeth and King Lear, makes her RSC debut with The Winter’s Tale.
