History re-visited this October at the RSC with The Whip and Oppenheimer

Photo credit: Steve Tanner

The Royal Shakespeare Company has today announced that they will premiere Juliet Gilkes Romero’s play The Whip online this October, as part of Black History Month. Calling the new work urgent and provocative, this new audio recording has been commissioned by The Royal Shakespeare Company and will be directed by Kimberley Sykes.

The Whip originally ran at The Swan Theatre in 2019, ending early due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the temporary closure of the Royal Shakespeare Company stages in March. The recording reunites the original cast with the play exploring the human cost of the multi-billion slavery compensation bill.

The audio recording of The Whip will premiere on the Royal Shakespeare Company YouTube channel on Thursday 29 October at 7pm.

The RSC has also announced that there will be a one-off play reading of Tom Morton Smith’s biographical epic Oppenheimer, commissioned by Angus Jackson. It will reunite the original cast of the RSC’s sell out 2014/2015 production, which also enjoyed a limited run at London’s Vaudeville Theatre. The play reading is to be broadcast via the RSC’s YouTube channel on Thursday 15 October at 7pm.

RSC Deputy Artistic Director, Erica Whyman, said: “I am delighted to be working again with Juliet Gilkes Romero and Kimberley Sykes to bring this astonishingly resonant piece of political drama to audiences. I can think of few plays that speak so directly to the moment as The Whip does, both in its forensic examination of Britain’s slave-owning past and how we, as individuals, attempt to navigate and confront that historical legacy, in all of its complexity and contradictions.

“The epic nature of the subject matter and the broad sweep of narrative that Juliet Gilkes Romero’s The Whip and Tom Moreton Smith’s Oppenheimer deal with is something we have always encouraged in our commissioned new work. Telling untold stories, exploring issues of power, responsibility and personal identity through the lens of a group of remarkable human beings, navigating their own place within a changing world, is at the very heart of what Shakespeare wrote about. By continuing our commitment to new writing, we hope to channel that same enquiring spirit through some of the most promising voices of today.”