THE world’s first festival of the Bard’s complete works is to be staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at its home in Stratford-upon-Avon, it announced yesterday.

The Complete Works, a year-long festival that is expected to draw more than 600,000 visitors, will mark the first time that the entire Shakespeare canon — all 37 plays, as well as all the sonnets and poems — will have been performed together.

Stars of stage and screen will perform throughout Stratford in an ambitious festival that begins in April 2006 and involves 18 theatre companies from across the world, as well as those in Britain.

There will be a Japanese Titus Andronicus and a panArab Richard III — reworked as a drama about Saddam Hussein’s rise to power — as well as 14 RSC productions, including a new musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor starring Dame Judi Dench and King Lear with Sir Ian McKellen in the title role.

Michael Boyd, the artistic director of the RSC, said: “Why are we doing it? Because we can, in a way no other theatre in the world can. It is an opportunity for us to see the plays afresh. The productions are going to shine brighter and be more vivid under the lamplight of the festival. It’s going to be a national knees-up about our national poet.” He added that, with the RSC’s finances in the black, they want now “to deepen the dialogue” with Shakespeare: “It will be like climbing up a mountain and seeing the whole landscape.”

As well as a new cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays and the return of Patrick Stewart in The Tempest, the festival will showcase international companies from South and North America, Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and across Europe.

Sulayman al-Bassam, the Anglo-Kuwaiti director, will direct Richard III. With a working title of The Baghdad Richard, the production will draw parallels between the 15th-century English king and the Iraqi dictator. Its director said: “Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s most compelling characters. I am interested in the way Shakespeare portrays tyranny and the way he aestheticises evil.

“The way in which Saddam launched his coup to take over in 1978 was very similar to the way Richard tries to pretend his brother George is behind the insurgency — spreading rumours and propaganda in order to get his rivals eliminated.”

The Baxter Theatre Centre of South Africa will present Hamlet, directed by Janet Suzman and starring Rajesh Gopie in the title role, while Tim Supple will direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a company of performers from across India and Sri Lanka.

The Complete Works will expand to venues throughout the market town. A new outdoor space, The Dell, is planned for the RSC’s riverside theatre gardens, hosting a fringe festival of work by amateur, school and student groups, and a temporary 100-seat studio theatre will present small-scale, multimedia and physical theatre companies.

A 1,000-seat Courtyard Theatre, which is scheduled to open in July 2006, will serve as the company’s main theatre.

Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, will provide the setting for a production of Henry VIII, while Shakespeare’s birthplace will host a series of debates. The festival has also inspired a major new publishing project — a new “RSC edition” of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick and a member of the RSC’s Board.

The editorial approach “will spare no blushes” with Shakespeare’s humour.

• Booking for RSC members opens on August 1 (for the period April to October 2006). General public booking opens on September 5. RSC ticket hotline: 0870 6091110.

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