Lead image by Lucy Barriball 2017 © RSC.
The Company
Cast
Narrator
Simon Russell Beale
Puppeteers
Bartolomeo Bartolini
Edie Edmundson
Lee Maeda
Rachel Leonard
Sarah Wright
Musician
Nick Lee
Creative Team
Director Greg Doran
Associate Director Sarah Wright
Director of Puppetry Steve Tiplady
Designer Rob Jones
Lighting Designers Vince Herbert, Lauren Watson
Music Arranged by John Woolf, Stevon Russell
Puppet Design and Creation Lyndie Wright with Jan Zalud, John Roberts, Stefan Fichert, Simon Auton, Jungmin Song
Puppetry Consultant Avye Leventis
Production Manager Mark Graham
Company Stage Manager Rachael Barber
Assistant Stage Manager François Pandolfo
Stage Technicians Matt Aston, Harry Oliver, Tom Watts, Ben Wheatley, Andy Barnes, Paul Hadfield
Lighting Technicians Lauren Watson, Claire Gerrens, Caroline Burrell
Marketing Consultant Chris Hill
Press & PR Ben Chamberlain (for Bread & Butter PR)
Producers Ben Tyreman, Griselda Yorke
Event information
Running time: Approximately 1 hour. There is no interval
Age guidance: 14+
Content warning: Contains mature themes and imagery
Keeping cool during your visit:
The Pit Theatre is an air-conditioned venue. We recommend bringing water with you. Our front of house team are on hand if there's anything you need.
Post-show talks
Thu 25 June at 3.30 – 4.15pm
In conversation with Professor Emma Smith, Greg Doran shares insights into the making of Venus & Adonis and talks about his latest publication, Walking Shadow: Love, Loss and Shakespeare, published by Bloomsbury. Greg Doran will be signing copies of his book. Free to same-day ticket holders.
Fri 26 June at 8.45 – 9.30pm
With Greg Doran and members of the company. Free to same-day ticket holders.
Production Acknowledgements
With thanks to Patsy Rodenburg OBE, Professor Emma Smith, Alice Watkins, Rachael Cowley & Karl Dixon, Curious School of Puppetry, Tall Stories, Oli Quintell & the RSC Production Video team, Carl Root, Mark Brockhurst for Paul Mathew Transport and Mallika Joy. And special thanks to original company members Michael Bayliss, Nele De Craecker and Lynn Robertson-Bruce.
Lead image by Lucy Barriball 2017 © RSC.
Presented by the Barbican
Originally produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Little Angel Theatre.
This new production is generously supported by Backstage Trust, the Sidney E. Frank Foundation and by Executive Producer Mark Pigott KBE, Jane Epstein, Ros and Alan Haigh, and David and Sandra Burbidge
Made in collaboration with Curious School of Puppetry.
Introduction
“She’s Love, she loves, and yet she is not loved”
The poem tells the story of the Goddess of Love, and her passionate fixation with the beautiful, headstrong Adonis. Venus waylays him while out riding one day and pulls him off his horse. He stoutly resists her charms, while his stallion runs off with a frisky mare, leaving his master without a lift home.
Venus is appalled when she hears he intends to go hunting for wild boar, and begs him not to go, but to no avail. The following morning she hears the
howling of the dogs, and realises that the hunt has cornered a dangerous animal. Suddenly she sees the boar with frothy mouth and bloody tusks and is terrified for her love. She curses Death.
Inspired by Japanese Bunraku Puppets and Jacobean Court Masque, this production, originally a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Little Angel Theatre, was first created in 2004. Now, Greg Doran revives his acclaimed version of Shakespeare’s great erotic poem using narration, music and puppetry.
Director’s Note
Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis in lockdown. When plague hit London in the summer of 1592 the theatres had to close. Shakespeare had no work and turned his hand to poetry and wrote this very funny, quite erotic narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. It was an instant sensation, going through 10 editions in his lifetime. A publishing bestseller.
I had often wondered how to adapt it for the stage, but it was not until I was on tour with the RSC in Japan in 1999 that I discovered a way that might work. I went to see the Bunraku Puppet Theatre in Osaka. There was a narrator on one side of the stage and a shamisen player on the other, and puppeteers in the centre manipulating these exquisite puppets. I was told by one of the master puppeteers that each element in Bunraku – Narration, Puppetry and Music – is equally important.
I realised how we might stage Venus and Adonis. So when we were back home in the UK, I visited the Little Angel Puppet Theatre in Islington, the home of British Puppetry, and discussed the idea with its co-founder Lyndie Wright and (then) Artistic Director, Steve Tiplady and we decided to collaborate and create what we would call a ‘puppet masque’. Lyndie called together a team of some of the best puppet-makers from all over the world, and we held several workshops with some brilliant puppeteers, whose creative imaginations helped develop the production. Sarah Wright and Rachel Leonard who appear in the show were part of that original team. John Woolf (then Head of Music at the RSC) helped choose the music from Shakespeare’s period, including a pavan from John Dowland’s Lachrimae.
Our original narrator was the late, great Michael Pennington. We heard of his sad passing as we started rehearsals in May this year and dedicate these performances to his memory.
Our workshops were held back in 2004, and puppetry was only just entering the theatrical mainstream. Julie Taymor had opened The Lion King in London in 1999. Anthony Minghella used a Bunraku puppet (created by Blind Summit) as the child of Madame Butterfly at ENO in 2005, and I remember Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, the founders of Handspring Puppets, coming to see our show when they were just beginning to devise War Horse which opened at the National Theatre in 2007.
Venus & Adonis combines all sorts of puppetry: classical string puppets, tabletop puppets, and shadow puppetry. There are beautiful marionettes of Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Southampton. Shakespeare himself also makes an appearance. There are puppets of Adonis’ stallion who is a bit of a stud, and the mare he fancies; Adonis’ nemesis the wild boar, and even a little hare. Oh and that ‘grim-grinning ghost’, Death himself, makes a terrifying appearance.
Of all the many productions I did at Stratford, Venus & Adonis is one of the ones of which I am most proud.
Greg Doran, RSC Artistic Director (2012-2022)
June 2026
Biographies
Narrator
Theatre includes: Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, King Lear, Ghosts, Richard III, The Seagull, Edward II, Troilus & Cressida, The Man of Mode and Restoration for the RSC; A Christmas Carol and John Gabriel Borkman at The Bridge Theatre; The Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre, Piccadilly Theatre and The Armory, NY; King Lear, Timon of Athens, Collaborators, London Assurance, A Slight Ache, Major Barbara, Much Ado About Nothing, The Alchemist, Life of Galileo, Jumpers (also Piccadilly), Humble Boy (also Gielgud), Hamlet, Battle Royal, Candide, Summerfolk, Money, Othello, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and Volpone at the National Theatre; Mr Foote’s Other Leg at Hampstead and the Haymarket; Temple, The Philanthropist, Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night at the Donmar; The Hothouse at Trafalgar Studios; Privates on Parade at the Noël Coward Theatre; Bluebird at the Atlantic Theatre, NY; The Cherry Orchard and The Winter’s Tale at BAM, the Old Vic and on international tour; Monty Python’s Spamalot at the Palace Theatre, London and Schubert Theatre, NY; Julius Caesar at the Barbican and on international tour; Richard II and Macbeth at the Almeida; Jumpers at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, NY; and The Invention of Love at Hampstead Theatre.
TV includes: House of the Dragon, Douglas is Cancelled, Mary & George, Vanity Fair, Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Penny Dreadful, Under the Covers, Monteverdi, Legacy, Park, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, God’s Country, Symphony, Spooks, Sacred Christmas Music, American Experience, Dunkirk, Great Historians, Gibbon and A Dance to the Music of Time.
Film includes: Firebrand, Radioactive, The Outfit, Benediction, Mary Queen of Scots, Operation Finale, The Death of Stalin, Museo, My Cousin Rachel, Tarzan, Savannah, Into the Woods, The Deep Blue Sea, My Week With Marilyn and Hamlet.
Associate Director and Puppeteer
Sarah Wright is a puppeteer, puppetry director and teacher. She is founder and Artistic Director of Curious School of Puppetry. Sarah trained at the Little Angel Theatre (founded by her parents) and has worked extensively within physical and puppetry-based theatre ever since. As puppeteer/performer: The Tao of Glass and Animo for Improbable; Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs), The Tin Drum and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings for Kneehigh; Silent Tide and The Adventures of Curious Ganz (Offie winner 2019) for Silent Tide; Plucked and Fish, Clay and Perspex with Liz Walker and Faulty Optic; and Life of Galileo at the Young Vic directed by Joe Wright. As puppetry director: Spirited Away for Toho Stage/PW Productions as Associate; Maddaddam for Wayne McGregor; Wild Bride, 946, FUP and Hansel and Gretel for Kneehigh; The Little Matchgirl for Emma Rice Company; Sleeping Beauty for Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures; and A Season in the Congo at the Young Vic. Film and TV include: The Dark Crystal Age of Resistance, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Pistol (directed by Danny Boyle), Princess and Peppernose and ‘M’ Son of the Century (directed by Joe Wright).
For the Barbican
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