A winter of discontent is anticipated by the embattled characters in Game of Thrones, but the Royal Shakespeare Company is banking on a glorious summer with its world premiere of a prequel to the hit TV series based on George RR Martin’s fantasy novels.
The new play, The Mad King, arrives 30 years to the month after the original publication of A Game of Thrones, the first novel in Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. It has a gala performance in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday evening in a reconfigured Royal Shakespeare theatre with a capacity of 870. Tickets for the entire run, priced from £10 to £95, have already sold out.
The RSC’s co-artistic directors, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, have said that the epic play – which lasts 225 minutes including an interval – “thrillingly imagines events teased in the books” and they trumpet it as the “first-ever stage production arising from the canon of George RR Martin”. The Mad King bookmarks, handy for all those doorstop novels, are on sale in the RSC gift shop – although scripts for the play are not currently purchasable, leading to heated discussions on message boards about its plot, which involves familiar characters from the houses of Targaryen, Stark, Lannister, Baratheon and Martell. To “protect the magic” of the play, theatregoers with cameraphones are asked to cover them with stickers labelled “sworn shield”, a reference to a dutiful oath in Game of Thrones.
The play is adapted by Duncan Macmillan, who has worked on it for almost a decade. In the programme, Macmillan writes that its focus is a jousting tournament at Harrenhal – “a major event in Game of Thrones lore that has never been depicted on the page or on screen”. Macmillan added that he and director Dominic Cooke wanted to make a play “for fans and novices alike, a piece of theatre that sits inside the wider history but is also complete in its own right”. Macmillan and Cooke were first announced in 2021 as collaborating on a Game of Thrones project for an unspecified venue.
The Mad King – which unfolds on a cross-shaped stage with the audience all around and has a cast of three dozen – weathered a challenging period of previews. Five early performances were cancelled, with an announcement that “the actors, creative and technical teams [were taking] the additional time necessary to progress and refine the work in real time, owing to the ambitious and epic nature of the production and, as a knock-on effect of unforeseen delays to the fit-up process”. (A spokesperson for the RSC said that affected audiences were contacted to arrange refunds or to rebook their tickets.)
The demand for tickets, alongside a sold out run of The Cherry Orchard (starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh) in its Swan theatre, will help fill the company’s coffers after what Evans described last year as a “perilous situation”. A recent restructure has enabled the company to reduce its cost base by £2.8m a year. The RSC said the process was “not solely based on reducing our financial overheads” but also to help it “work as effectively and efficiently as possible and to position us to generate additional income to invest in the creation of theatre and learning through theatre, which is our founding purpose”.
By transforming its stage into the world of Westeros for The Mad King, the RSC hopes to welcome audiences who are new to either its Stratford venue or to theatre more generally. In recent years, it has drawn upon existing IP with considerable success, including an adaptation of the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbour Totoro, also powered by imaginative puppetry like The Mad King. My Neighbour Totoro opened at the Barbican in London in 2022 and transferred to the West End, where it will end its run in January.
Among the audience at the Royal Shakespeare theatre on Friday night was Game of Thrones fan Edward, 29, from Dudley, who said he had visited Birmingham Hippodrome and Wolverhampton Grand but it was his first time at the RSC. “I just can’t stop smiling – it’s so fun,” he said of the production, despite initially being “shocked when I saw the run time”. Another newcomer to the building was Aisha, 28, who had travelled from London. A fan of the franchise, Aisha said the play “compares very well to the books and films – they’ve done an amazing job”.
Rachel, 51, comes to the RSC a couple of times a year, most recently for an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, and said that mixing Shakespeare with such adaptations provides “a good variety”. Diane, 66, was there to see The Cherry Orchard and expressed frustration that the company’s two main stages had no Shakespeare this summer (a trimmed version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made with the Unicorn children’s theatre, is on at its third venue, The Other Place.) “For me personally it’s disappointing. I know that sounds snobby, I don’t mean it to, but the name’s the Royal Shakespeare Company … The balance is off. It’s a little bit of a betrayal of their name and raison d’etre but I’m well aware they have financial difficulties.” Diane acknowledged: “I’m probably the only one on earth who hasn’t watched [the TV series] … I know there’s a following that’s very loyal.”
On the fan forum Theatreboard, people who had seen The Mad King variously praised its “full Shakespearean tragic resonance” and “Shakespearean-ish cadence”, with one saying that it was “on a par in theatrical terms with the London 2012 opening ceremony”.
Steven and Bethany, both 30, recently moved to Stratford and saw the RSC’s Henry V earlier this year. Bethany arrived “hoping for a dragon tonight!” and Steven said that they hadn’t expected the RSC to stage such a production. “It brings in more people who wouldn’t usually come to the theatre,” said Bethany. “They might enjoy the experience and see what else is on offer as well. With it being in Stratford, rather than London, you’re bringing in different crowds.”
“You’d expect to see it on the West End rather than Stratford,” agreed Steven. The RSC’s Hamlet Hail to the Thief, another bid to draw new audiences by accompanying the tragedy with a Radiohead album, opens in London this winter. The Mad King is widely tipped to follow hot on its heels.
