Lawn as white as driven snow; Cyprus black as e'er was crow;
Gloves as sweet as damask roses; Masks for faces and for noses;
Bugle bracelet, necklace amber, Perfume for a lady's chamber;
Golden quoifs and stomachers, For my lads to give their dears:
Pins and poking-sticks of steel, What maids lack from head to heel:
Autolycus, in The Winter’s Tale, would have had no trouble stocking his pedlar’s pack
of delights, in here.
I am Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And this is one
of my favourite places in our whole theatre site. Right at the beating heart of the company.
It's our Costume Workshop. It’s hidden away just opposite our main theatre buildings,
here in Stratford-upon-Avon.
It's a higgledy-piggledy rabbit warren of rooms, an Aladdin’s cave of hidden treasures.
Craftsmen and women have been working on this site since it opened in 1887 as the scene
dock for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.
The great British artist, Dame Laura Knight, was artist in residence here, in 1948, after
the Second World War, and she called the wardrobe “a goldmine”. She painted an old yellow
silk dress hanging on a dummy, and we’ve made a copy of it here. And these are the
very same windows in that picture.
Laura Knight later wrote. “Here I found activity in the employment of needle and thread
on dummy actor and actress; cutting, pinning and fitting; the floor strewn with odd lengths
of material, scissors and velvets of considerable antiquity, these superb pieces of colour,
cutting and workmanship, in spite of their moth-chewed trimmings, were historical, worn
long ago by performers of fame”.
Indeed, Laura Knight describes at one point the opening of the Victorian actor manager
Sir Henry Irving’s wardrobe trunk, which he must have left to the theatre, in order
to see what could be used.
And that recycling goes on today. I remember we were doing a production of All’s Well
That Ends Well in the Swan a few years ago, and Claudie Blakey who was playing Helena
and we needed a different costume when she plays the pilgrim. So, somebody scurried off
to the wardrobe, found a few different things for her to try on and she came back on stage
during the technical rehearsal wearing a very simple black dress with long sleeves. Judi
Dench who was playing the Countess in that production suddenly looked at this dress and
said, "Can I just have a look at that?", turned back the label at the back of the dress and it
said, “Judi Dench: Lady Macbeth 1976”.
But as you can imagine, although some things are exactly the same since Laura Knight painted
here, some things have deteriorated very badly. In the last seventy odd years, this jumble
of buildings has begun to leak - freezing in winter, too hot in summer, and frankly
no longer fit for purpose.
And so…. We have some amazing plans for the restoration
and redevelopment of these historic buildings. And we’ve just launched the Stitch in Time
campaign to fund them.
The redevelopment of the Costume Workshop will create the best facilities for costume
making, in a working environment fit for the 21st century. We will care for our heritage
Grade II listed buildings and increase our space by 60%. This will allow us to create
new training and apprenticeship opportunities to secure the future of costume making in
Stratford-upon-Avon. And, for the first time, visitors will be able to experience our world-class
costume workshop for themselves on tours and online.
Millions of people across the world enjoy the phenomenal design work in our productions
every year. The standard of costume making at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is second
to none. They are quite simply the best: made in Stratford-upon-Avon and shared around the world.
To make this project possible we need to raise £3 million and today, I am asking you to
help us.
Please support our Stitch in Time campaign and give what you can. Thank you.