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Shakespeare for sale


• The robe worn by Sir Ian McKellen when he played King Lear in 2007, was one of many items in the recent RSC Costume sale


300 hats, Egyptian head-dresses, a variety of military uniforms, cloaks, clerical outfits – including nuns and priests, jewellery and chain- mail. The items covered a wide range of costume periods, including retro, vintage, Early English, Elizabethan and twentieth century. Amongst them were soldiers’


tabards and chain-mail from the RSC’s 1984 production of Henry V (with Kenneth Branagh). These had also been used in Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart as the RSC Costume Department does big business in hiring to other theatre and film producers.


Other celebrity costume items on sale were a light blue 18th century waistcoat worn by Charles Dance in As You Like It, a wine-coloured velvet Regency cutaway coat worn by Sir Ben Kingsley, a selection of shirts worn by Sir Ian McKellen in The Seagull plus his robe from King Lear and numerous items worn by David Tennant (including his complete understudy costume from the 2008 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost). . Alistair McArthur, RSC Head of


Costume, and Stephanie Smith, Costume Store Manager, and their teams had the Herculean task of going through every costume to select those items that went into the sale.


‘It was a mammoth task’ said


new Stratford-upon- Avon theatre for public viewing and preparing for its historic first season of plays in April, the company realised that its costume and props storage rooms were bursting at the seams and that it desperately needed to trim down the 40,000 items that had accumulated there over the years! As a result, some ten thousand of those items went on sale in a mid-February extravaganza that, not surprisingly, saw queues around the block at the RSC Rehearsal Rooms in Stratford. The sale included over 1,000 pairs of shoes, 500 shirts,


I 7 March 2011 4


t’s been a busy time for the Royal Shakespeare Company this winter. As well as opening the wonderful


Alistair McArthur, ‘with each of the 40,000 garments held there having to be individually assessed and


reviewed by the RSC team’. ‘We had items for sale from every area of the wardrobe, including costumes that first made their debut on stage back in the 1970s and ‘80s as well as clothing created by top theatre designers like Deirdre Clancy and our own Olivier Award-winning Tom Piper’. ‘It was a great success and we were thrilled that so many people (estimated to number in the thousands over the course of the day – Ed.) took the opportunity to come along and purchase a piece of theatre history.


By Bruce Cox


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