The Royal Shakespeare Company brings Game of Thrones’ Mad King to the stage
Developed over time first seen 2 months ago
The Royal Shakespeare Company has staged The Mad King, a new Game of Thrones prequel at Stratford-upon-Avon charting the descent of King Aerys II Targaryen into tyranny. Written by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke, the production deliberately echoes Shakespeare's own history plays and tragedies, giving theatrical weight to a psychological and political collapse previously known to fans only as backstory referenced in the television series and George R.R. Martin's novels.
The staging brings Westeros to life through elaborate stagecraft, including dragons and other magical elements, sustaining a three-hour-and-forty-minute runtime with visual spectacle. It dramatises pivotal moments from the saga's history, including the Tourney at Harrenhal and the build-up to Robert's Rebellion, fleshing out events and characters that fans previously knew only second-hand, and giving the RSC's take on the Mad King's fall a fuller, more human dimension than the source material's brief accounts.
- RSC stages Game of Thrones prequel The Mad King in Stratford-upon-Avon
- Play traces King Aerys II Targaryen's descent into madness
- Written by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Dominic Cooke, with dragons on stage
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Game of Thrones, created by George R.R. Martin and later adapted into an HBO television series, is a fantasy saga set in the fictional land of Westeros. Long before the events most fans know from the TV show, the Iron Throne was held by King Aerys II Targaryen, nicknamed the Mad King, whose increasingly paranoid and violent rule eventually led to his overthrow. That rebellion, and the fall of House Targaryen, is the backstory that shaped much of the saga's later plot.
The Royal Shakespeare Company is one of Britain's leading theatre companies, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, and best known for staging his plays alongside new work. It has now turned to this Targaryen backstory for an original stage production, written by playwright Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke, treating the material with the kind of tragic, historical weight associated with Shakespeare's own history plays.
This matters because it marks an unusual crossover between a prestigious classical theatre institution and a hugely popular modern fantasy franchise, testing whether a story once told only in flashback and dialogue can work as a full theatrical production, complete with elaborate stagecraft to depict dragons and other fantastical elements on stage.
Coverage
- The Guardian — Game of Thrones: The Mad King review – an action-packed saga of dry ice and fire
- GamesRadar+ — I went to see new Game of Thrones play The Mad King, and for 3 hours and 40 minutes I was transported to a world of dragons and magic
- GamesRadar+ — 16 things we learned about Game of Thrones from The Mad King play
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