Costumes worn by David Tennant, Penny Wilton and James Fleet are for sale
Saturday 12 February, 10am – 5pm
RSC Rehearsal Rooms, Arden Street
(at the junction with Birmingham Rd)
The Royal Shakespeare Company will be holding a Costume Sale on Saturday 12 February at its rehearsal rooms in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Around 10,000 items including costumes, shoes, hats and accessories will be available to purchase. The sale includes over 1,000 pairs of shoes, 500 shirts, 300 hats, Egyptian head-dresses, a variety of military uniforms, cloaks, clerical outfits – including nuns and priests, jewellery and chain-mail. The items cover a wide range of periods, including retro, vintage, Early English, Elizabethan and twentieth century.
The garments in the sale, originally constructed by the world renowned RSC Costume Department, have been chosen from the RSC Costume Store (which hires out RSC costumes after they have finished being used in its productions).
Amongst the items for sales are soldiers’ tabards and chain-mail from the RSC’s 1984 production of Henry V (with Kenneth Branagh) and later seen in Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart, a light blue 18th century waistcoat worn by Charles Dance in As You Like It, a wine velvet regency cutaway coat worn by Sir Ben Kingsley, a selection of shirts worn by Sir Ian McKellen in The Seagull and his over-robe from King Lear and numerous items worn by David Tennant (including his understudy costume from the 2008 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost).
The sale, which takes place at the RSC’s rehearsal rooms in Arden Street in Stratford-upon-Avon (at the junction with Birmingham Road), will be open to members of the public on Saturday 12 February between 10am-5pm. Customer parking is available nearby at the Stratford District Council pay and display car park on Arden Street, and there is a
facility for customer collection only, at the front of the building.
I thought it was a good sale and I enjoyed it. My wife and I got there at about 08:30 and were in the first 50 in the queue (we got up at 04:00). After about 9:00 the queue really started growing up along the street and we could not see the end. There were still many thousands of good quality items inside when we left at 10:45.
I am afraid if you had waited for three hours from 9.45 to gain entry and watched people walking out with 9-10 bags of clothes and by the time we got in there, there were no real items worth buying for re enactment purposes, it was not worth attending. the news said that 200 per time were admitted we saw approximately between 4 and 12 persons at a time and only when that number came out