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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.