RSC: Rancour Subterfuge Calamity

In February of this year Adrian Noble, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was in ebullient mood. His production of The Secret Garden was about to open in the West End and the omens for its success were good – it had taken more than £1m in advance box office before its Stratford opening, the largest ever advance for an RSC production. What's more, Noble had plans for the company from which it had come – an aggressive project to reshape its Stratford home, to release it from what he saw as the "tyranny" of its London base in the Barbican and to market the RSC brand worldwide. Asked by a journalist to define the nature of the company that was about to undergo this startling makeover, he had no difficulty in coming up with an inspiring mission statement: "It's a company," he said, "that draws its inspiration from the Renaissance and provides us with epic, mythic stories."

Well, nobody could deny that the past few months have proved him right – though, as in quite a few mythic stories, there is a malign twist to the vindication. The Royal Shakespeare Company has become the drama – and it is seen by many to offer a plot dense with betrayal, court politics and hubris.

If you want "Renaissance inspiration", then just listen to the director who described Noble's immediate circle at the RSC as creating a "Vatican-like atmosphere – the Pope and his nuncios". And if you want "epic", then just look through the cuttings: there have been dramatic recantations – Terry Hands, Noble's predecessor and mentor at the RSC resigned, declaring that the plans were "artistically and financially" unviable – and there has even been a Royal summons – at the beginning of September, Noble and the RSC's managing director Chris Foy were invited to discuss matters with the Prince of Wales at Highgrove, such was the volume of anguished mail the Prince had been receiving. The Secret Garden, incidentally, closed early after a three-month run.

That last fact isn't simply a malicious addition to the fusillade of criticisms that Noble has had to withstand in the past few weeks. It's a straw in an icy wind – because much of what this story is about comes down to the commercial value of the three letters that make up the company name. In that same interview in February, there was no sign of aesthetic squeamishness about the way Noble embraced the language of the Harvard Business School to describe the property he proposed to take to market. "We are a global brand," he said. "We create product that is of interest to a lot of people, and we are seeking a way by which we can find outlets for that work." To that end, Noble had hired Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie, a New York literary agent, to extract the maximum available profit from the company acronym – most obviously as a kind of Shakespearean kite-mark, a guarantee of quality from the home town of Bardolatry. From now on, it seemed, it wasn't just going to be "I Love Willy" T-shirts and Macbeth erasers in the Stratford gift-shop, but a professional exercise in merchandising Shakespearean purity.

And if this sent shivers of unease through those with delicate sensibilities, there was worse to come. Noble announced a plan to rebuild the Stratford memorial theatre (a building with few passionate friends, it has to be said), and create a "Shakespeare village" on the banks of the river, at which devoted pilgrims would arrive by boat, having parked their cars nearby. Noble was at pains to explain that this didn't mean hog roasts served up by doubleted valets – but his alternative vision of tourists taking part in a fight workshop before attending an evening performance of Hamlet didn't reassure everyone.

While Shakespeare World was rising beside the Avon, it was also announced that the long-established London branch of the RSC would be closed down in favour of ad-hoc homes in the West End – the argument being that West End managements would be only too glad to compete for the box-office kudos of an RSC production.

The principal accusation on the charge sheet when it comes to this last proposal is not – as it might have been in the old days – one of capitulation to commercial values. It's one of simple naivety. The idea that shrewd commercial managers will bring any kind of sentiment to their dealings with the RSC is more than a little ingenuous, say the sceptics. "If they have a disaster – which they will, since you can't run a string of hits in perpetuity – they will be shown no mercy," said one experienced director. The Almeida Theatre – which recently dipped a toe into West End production, and then pulled it out again pretty rapidly after being scalded – does not provide a good omen for the RSC's two-cultures economic revolution. Others have pointed out that leaving the Barbican will cost the company a great deal of money, since its residency in this purpose-built theatre is subsidised by the Corporation of London. Negotiations are currently under way over how much the RSC will have to return for cutting short its current lease on the theatre – and the Barbican's negotiators are likely to be no more sentimental in their dealings than West End impresarios.

There are worse accusations than mere naivety, too – because Noble has been widely charged with squandering one of the RSC's least tangible but most crucial assets: the goodwill of all those who work for the organisation. Although the RSC insisted that it had consulted its associate artists – top-rank actors whose names, figuratively speaking, go on the stationery – it wasn't difficult to find people whose first intimations about the plans were delivered with the morning newspaper.

Communications with the existing company were even worse, by some accounts – leaving onstage and backstage staff baffled or fearful, or an ugly combination of both. Some of the consequences of this have been highly visible. Last week, backstage staff at the Barbican voted nine to one in favour of strike action over the proposals – an action that might threaten the RSC's Christmas season in Stratford. (Yesterday's annual governors' meeting, however, appears to have passed without untoward incident, apart from the cancellation of the Prince of Wales's scheduled appearance following a gardening accident involving a Highgrove tree.) Elsewhere, the corrosion of company sympathies is more insidious; one observer suggested that Alice In Wonderland – the RSC's flagship Christmas show, which has received less than enchanted reviews so far – had been a victim of diminished morale among those who worked on it.

Theatre has always been dependent on the invisible subsidy of enthusiasm – the belief that theatre should involve a kind of vocational dedication – and when that priceless enthusiasm begins to dissolve, it becomes ever more difficult to sustain that of the audience. One leading actor was reportedly approached to head up a West End company for a Royal Shakespeare Company season, and replied that he would be delighted – as long as he was paid West End rates. The goodwill discount, so important to the maintenance of the RSC brand, is easy to lose and very difficult to win back.

It is bound to affect other matters, too – in more collegiate times, there might have been no muttering at all about the fact that Noble is scheduled to direct a wholly commercial production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which is to open at the London Palladium next April. But if he thinks that this extra-curricular activity will pass without comment now, then "naivety" is hardly the word – whether he's taking an unpaid sabbatical or not, the charge of divided attention at a time of crisis for the company will be difficult to rebut. We are entering an ice field, the captain announces, but I'm off to do a spot of relief work on a Caribbean cruise liner.

And that his "brand" has suffered over the past few months is incontrovertible. Noble may not have done a Ratner yet – in fact, he's been doing precisely the opposite, fiercely talking up the quality of recent product lines – but all the same, the letters RSC do not mean quite what they once did for a lot of people. And that's a troubling fact for a company on the brink of betting its future on name recognition. There is some justice to Noble's resentment of this prejudice – the company has had some signal artistic successes just recently. In any case, as another distinguished director points out: "The artistic life of theatre companies is terribly capricious – you have periods of tremendously creative work, and then there's a bit of a trough... everything in the world has a wave pattern."

Just at the moment for the RSC, though, the wave pattern is unusually violent. These are the kind of breakers that can easily overwhelm an untrimmed vessel, and if they are not to do so, Noble and his colleagues need to think hard about the core values of their business – and to stop using jargon such as "core values". The drama has been eventful so far – but the next act is going to be even more interesting, and there are no guarantees of a happy ending.