Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Built by local brewer Charles Edward Flower, who donated the riverside land, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened on 23 April 1879, Shakespeare's birthday, with a performance of Much Ado About Nothing. Audiences came to Stratford specifically for Shakespeare from the beginning, though the early company was a seasonal visiting operation rather than a permanent ensemble.

On 6 March 1926, fire gutted the original building, leaving only the brick tower and the shell of what would become the Swan Theatre. Elisabeth Scott won the competition to design a replacement, becoming the first woman to design a major public building in Britain. Her new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened in 1932 and drew immediate criticism for its asymmetric modernist exterior, though the building served the company for nearly eighty years.

The company was formally renamed the Royal Shakespeare Company on 20 March 1961, when Peter Hall took over as artistic director and committed to a permanent ensemble rather than a seasonal visiting operation. Hall wanted the RSC to be a company of actors working together over time, not a collection of stars hired production by production.

A major reconstruction of the main house began in 2007. The endstage auditorium, which placed all 1,040 seats directly in front of a proscenium arch (a traditional framing stage with audience on one side only), was replaced with a thrust configuration that pushes the stage deep into the audience. The rebuilt theatre reopened on 24 November 2010; Queen Elizabeth II formally opened it on 4 March 2011. The reconstruction also created a Rooftop Restaurant and a tower with panoramic views across the Avon.

The Swan Theatre opened in 1986, built inside the Victorian brick shell that survived the 1926 fire. Architect Michael Reardon designed a galleried auditorium of around 450 seats modelled on Elizabethan inn-yard staging, with no proscenium and audience arranged on three sides. The Other Place, a studio space first opened in 1974 by director Buzz Goodbody, was reinstated in its current form in March 2016 with a capacity of 200 seats.