Antony Sher and John Kani to Star in RSC’s The Tempest

Antony Sher and John Kani will star as Prospero and Caliban, respectively in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in February 2009. A co-production with South Africa’s Baxter Company, the show will be directed by Janice Honeyman.

Over the next three years, the company will also present new productions of such other Shakespeare plays asRomeo and Juliet, directed by Rupert Goold, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and Julius Caesar, as well as a UK tour of Othello.

The RSC’s “Other Russia” series will offer a look into the dramatic life of the countries that made up the former Soviet Union. Offerings will include The Grain Store, Natal’ia Vorozhbit’s epic account of the 1930s Ukrainian famine starring Kathryn Hunter; The Drunks, Mikhail and Vyachelsav Durnenko’s play about a reluctant Chechnyan war hero; Rona Munro’s Little Eagles, a history of the USSR-USA space race in the 1960s; and Silence, about a British journalist who interviews a Russian theatremaker, and new stagings of works by Pushkin, Gogol and Chekhov.

For more information, visit www.whatsonstage.com