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We already knew the new RSC season was good un’, thanks to the early announcement last week of Game of Thrones: The Mad King, the largely self-explanatory (though you can read more about it here if you want) stage prequel to George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books.
That’s not all the Royal Shakespeare Company has in store for us over the next year or so – not by a long shot. Following The Mad King – the dates of which are TBC, but it'll be this summer – Hollywood and Broadway star Jonathan Groff will return to the British stage for the first time in over a decade. He’ll star as Rosalind in an all-male production of Shakespeare’s forest-set romp As You Like It (Sep 26-Nov 7) that will also star the redoubtable Brit actor Fisayo Akinade as Rosalind’s BFF Celia. RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans directs.
Balancing out the all-lads As You Like It is a revival for Phyllida Lloyd’s seminal all-female Julius Caesar (Nov 5-28), which was first seen at the Donmar Warehouse a decade ago and returns alongside star Harriet Walter, who’ll be reprising her superb turn as Brutus.
The Swan Theatre will be dominated by the sort of thing the RSC does best: from October to the new year it’ll play host to an epic, two-part adaptation of George Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch (Oct 1-Jan 16 2026), written by Nina Raine, who is currently doing the honours for the National Theatre’s much-anticipated Summerfolk.
Finally, the busy year will be rounded off with the RSC’s traditional Big Christmas Show, which this year will be a brand new stage version of Alexandre Dumas swashbuckling classic The Three Musketeers (Nov 28 2026-Jan 9 2027). There are several ways you could tackle Dumas’s essentially serious novel, but we can pretty much assume this going to be a funny one, seeing as how it’s a co-production with of the tirelessly absurd theatre company Told By An Idiot, adapted by the company’s boss Paul Hunter.
A spectacular season, and really a little something for everyone (apart from mixed-sex Shakespeare).
Public booking for the RSC’s autumn season will open March 18. Game of Thrones: The Mad King will go on sale April 24.
The best new London theatre to book for in 2026.
Plus: Catherine Tate is taking over the lead role in the West End’s Oh, Mary!.
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