Breaking Baz: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Heads To The Royal Shakespeare Company Stage This Summer For New Adventures From Westeros

EXCLUSIVE: George R.R. Martin is bringing the world of Westeros to the stage with the world premiere of Game of Thrones: The Mad Kingwhich begins performances at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s flagship Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon this summer.

Director Dominic Cooke, who has worked on the project for several years with award-winning playwright Duncan Macmillan, tells us that there will be “some really thrilling big moments” in the play.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that there’s a lot of fighting going on, but we’re sort of trying to find a theatrical way of doing things,” Cooke says.

The production will have a star-crossed-lovers vibe set against the backdrop of a jousting tournament on Harrenhal, set over a decade and a half before the events in the HBO Game of Thrones dramas.

The people who attended the tourney was a young Ned Stark, his sister Lynna and Jamie Lannister. “So those ones and then Robert Baratheon, they’re the sort of main characters, and they’re the characters that people really know but much younger,” Cooke explains.

Varys also will make an appearance. There are other characters in the play that end up playing larger parts in the series, “but are playing quite small parts here,” Cooke says from his office at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, North London, where he has just taken over from Rupert Goold as artistic director.

Helpfully, Cooke says that “one of our ambitions is to make a show that really works for people who don’t know the material as people who do and every sort of shade in between … because obviously there will be people who come who don’t know it, and we want to give them a satisfying evening as well. So we’ve sort of tried to make a contained thing as well as something that gives the fans all the extra bits of story that they don’t know.”

Lyanna Stark, when we see her in The Mad King, is in her teens, about 16. She’s one character that people don’t know very well and is sort of a central character, Cooke explains. “She’s a really good swords person, so she doesn’t really fit the mold of how the women at that time were supposed to behave. But she’s also very intuitive and very smart, and she’s a live wire,” he says. “She’s got a rebellious streak to her and also, like everyone in that world, if you’re in these high families, you have to conform. And this is where it’s rather like in Shakespeare.”

I ask Cooke which character from Shakespeare might she identity most closely with. Like a character out of Joan of Arc in Henry VI or even Rosalind in As You Like Ithe suggests.

Although already promised to Robert Baratheon, Lyanna instead “gets together,” as Cooke puts it, with Rhaegar Targaryen, the son of Aerys, the Mad King of the title. She’s Ned Stark’s beloved sister and has a lot in common with her niece, Arya Stark.

“There’s a bit of a Romeo and Juliet-type story with those two,” Cooke notes.

But there’s much more to it than that, Macmillan observes. He says Lyanna is a “really important” character that we hear about a lot in the novels and the series “but are yet to meet.”
The playwright believes that Lyanna is the “catalyst for so much that follows. In fact, I’d say that without Lyanna Stark, there is no Game of Thrones.”

Macmillan joined the production at the end of 2018 and spent awhile getting to grips with the wide range of material. Then he and Cooke went to the U.S. to meet with the celebrated author. The original idea had been to focus purely on the tournament of Harrenhal, but when he dug into the events of that tournament, there were so many stories that began there that, says the writer, “I became convinced we had to extend the proposed timeframe and follow them through.”

Together, he and Cooke were looking at Shakespearean histories and tragedies and wanted to emulate their structure. And of course, he “read and reread” the Game of Thrones books and says that they were “the primary source.”

The play is based on events that are described in the books but took place several years earlier, which meant Macmillan had to sift through them “looking for clues, establishing who was in attendance, what happened there, whose account was reliable, etc. George has also written some fantastic histories, which were really useful. And then, of course, there were events which George has never previously revealed, things that have been the source of intense speculation, and I had to go directly to George for those,” says Macmillian, who won awards for his play People, Places and Things that starred Denise Gough.

And during the whole process, says Macmillan, the Game of Thrones creator was “a fantastically trusting collaborator while also being protective of his characters and world.” Macmillan liaised with us from New York, where he is working with Daniel Radcliffe and director Jeremy Herrin on the Broadway opening of his interactive monologue Every Brilliant Thing.

The Royal Shakespeare Company seems to be a perfect fit. In fact, Martin long has spoken of his love for Shakespeare and how the RSC’s acclaimed staging of the history plays were an inspiration to a young George R. R. Martin.

“He really knows his Shakespeare, and he loves Shakespeare,” Cooke says.

Martin traveled to London and Stratford over the years to attend the many workshops.

Part of the appeal for Martin was that Cooke, who started his career as a trainee director at the RSC, is steeped in the Bard, as is Macmillan.

Cooke says that Shakespeare has been his benchmark even when doing new plays. “And I think it’s also what really excited George because he felt it was quite true to the spirit of what he was starting on.”

Casting is underway, and offers have been made to actors for two of the key roles. One of the biggest tasks is to find the right actress for Lyanna; sounds like a star-making part for a well-trained unknown.

The fun thing about it, says Cooke, is “that they’re all young. The main characters, apart from the king, they’re all sort of in their 20s. If you think about Ned, he was played by Sean Bean in the TV show, and we are playing him in his 20s. So it’s just interesting to see them as young people. Part of the essence of this show is a story of growing up, rites of passage, people becoming who they are.”

Tickets for Game of Thrones: The Mad King go on sale in April.

There’s chatter that the production will transfer into the West End after it completes its summer season in Stratford. I suspect that it may well end up at the Gillian Lynne Theatre. The RSC, rather shrewdly, already has a showMy Neighbour Totoroin the Gilly Lynne, as we call it, so it would not surprise me at all if it becomes home to Game of Thrones.