London’s theatre scene is quietly sitting on a fault line—and a new company is stepping directly into it.
The RT Project is launching a performer training model designed to challenge the traditional drama school route at a moment when the sector is under real strain. A Level Drama entries have fallen by 48% since 2010, GCSE entries have halved over the past 15 years, and the pipeline of specialist teachers is shrinking. At the same time, access remains starkly unequal: the Sutton Trust reports that BAFTA-nominated actors are five times more likely to have been privately educated.
This isn’t happening in isolation. Industry figures including Stephen Graham, Christopher Eccleston and Paul Roseby have all spoken publicly about the growing barriers to entry, with Roseby warning of a “massive decline in working-class talent wanting to take part.”
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| Romeo and Juliet. |
Against that backdrop, The RT Project is offering an alternative: a repertory theatre model where performers train through live production, at minimal or no cost, embedded in the industry rather than separated from it.
Their debut production, DIGNITY, opens 29 June – 3 July at The Cause, before moving into a monthly residency. It’s an immersive reimagining of Romeo and Juliet through the lens of 90s rave culture—blending live DJ sets, multi-casting, and audience-led narrative. The production itself doubles as the training ground, placing emerging performers in front of audiences from day one.
We caught up with The RT Project Artistic Directors Ryan Hurst and Tilly Gaunt to learn more about their work and DIGNITY.
THE RT PROJECT
What was the breaking point moment that made you realise a new model was no longer optional, but necessary?
For both of us, it wasn’t one dramatic moment — it was the accumulation of watching talented people quietly disappear.
As educators and practitioners, we kept meeting brilliant young performers who simply couldn’t afford to continue. Some couldn’t access drama school at all. Others were taking on huge debt for training with no guarantee of industry access afterwards. At the same time, we were watching arts provision disappear from schools, specialist teachers leaving the profession, and working-class representation shrinking in front of our eyes.
You start asking yourself: if the current system is genuinely working, why are so many talented people locked out of it?
Drama schools still have value, absolutely. But the industry around them has changed. Many institutions are struggling financially themselves, whilst training becomes increasingly inaccessible to the very people who historically gave British theatre and film its voice, grit and identity.
Eventually we realised waiting for someone else to fix it wasn’t enough. We had to build something ourselves.
What does a successful outcome look like for a performer graduating from an RT Project cycle?
Success for us is bigger than simply securing an agent, although obviously that remains important.
A successful performer leaving an RT Project cycle should understand how to sustain themselves creatively and professionally inside the industry. That means resilience, adaptability, collaboration, creating work, understanding audiences, producing opportunities rather than waiting for permission, and being able to function inside live performance environments under pressure.
The reality is the industry no longer works in neat lanes. Actors are now often creators, facilitators, producers, movement practitioners, digital artists, educators and entrepreneurs simultaneously.
We want performers leaving us not only employable, but empowered.
And honestly, another marker of success is whether somebody still feels they belong in the arts afterwards. That’s becoming rarer than it should be.
How are you ensuring that your minimal or no cost model reaches the communities most affected by the current barriers?
The biggest mistake arts organisations make is assuming accessibility begins at the point of audition. It doesn’t. By then you’ve already lost huge numbers of people psychologically, geographically and financially.
So for us it’s about relationships and visibility.
We’re engaging directly with state schools, FE colleges, youth theatres, alternative training providers and communities that are traditionally underrepresented within conservatoire training. We’re also trying to demystify the industry itself. A lot of young people simply don’t see the arts as “for them” anymore.
When 89% of working-class families say they don’t see value in the arts, that’s not a talent problem — that’s a structural and cultural problem.
We want people to see performers who sound like them, come from where they come from, and have taken non-traditional routes into the profession.
Why choose the repertory model specifically?
Because you learn things in front of an audience that cannot be simulated in a classroom.
Repertory theatre demands stamina, adaptability, ensemble awareness and responsiveness. It teaches performers how to recover when things go wrong, how to hold an audience, how to sustain a run, how to work at pace and how to collaborate inside a living ecosystem rather than a protected training bubble.
There’s also something psychologically transformative about performers understanding that their work has real public consequence.
The audience changes you.
And historically, repertory models produced some of Britain’s most exciting actors because people learned through doing the job repeatedly, rigorously and publicly.
How is The RT Project funded, and is this model scalable?
Right now, through a mixture of self-funding, earned income, partnerships, reduced-cost collaboration and an enormous amount of goodwill and labour.
Which is the honest answer.
But long term, the goal is sustainability rather than dependency. We’re interested in mixed models: ticket revenue, partnerships, philanthropy, sponsorship, educational collaboration and funding support where appropriate.
The key thing is that accessibility cannot rely entirely on exploitation or unpaid labour. The industry already has too much of that.
Can it scale? Yes — but carefully. We’d rather grow sustainably and protect the ethos than expand rapidly and become another institution replicating the same problems.
What could the Big Three drama schools or the Department for Education learn from your model?
That talent development and financial exclusivity cannot continue to exist side by side without consequences.
British culture has always been strongest when working-class voices were central to it. If those voices disappear because access becomes too expensive, British theatre and television lose authenticity, urgency and connection to ordinary life.
I think institutions sometimes underestimate how much the next generation wants collaboration, flexibility and real-world experience. Young artists are asking different questions now.
The industry needs to stop treating accessibility as outreach and start treating it as survival.
How do you hope British theatre changes because of it?
I hope it becomes less homogenous again.
I hope audiences see more regional voices, more socioeconomic diversity, more risk, more experimentation, more urgency. I hope young performers stop feeling that the arts belong primarily to people with financial safety nets.
And I hope theatre becomes something people participate in again rather than simply consume.
Ultimately, we want to help rebuild the idea that theatre is communal, necessary and accessible — not elite.
DIGNITY
Why did 90s rave culture feel like the right lens for Romeo & Juliet?
Because rave culture was tribal, euphoric, political and dangerous all at once — which is exactly what Romeo & Juliet is.
People often reduce the play to a love story, but underneath it is youth culture colliding with violence, identity, tribal loyalty, masculinity, ecstasy and self-destruction.
The rave scene had that same contradiction. Extreme connection sitting beside real darkness.
Also, there’s something deeply Shakespearean about collective experience. Audiences at the Globe weren’t passive. They were noisy, emotional, communal. Rave culture felt like a contemporary equivalent of that energy.
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| Nurse and Mercutio. |
How does the fluidity of DIGNITY prepare performers for the modern industry?
The modern industry demands flexibility constantly.
In DIGNITY, performers multi-role, navigate immersive audience interaction, adapt spatially, shift between narrative and movement, respond to live music environments and sustain ensemble storytelling.
That’s much closer to the realities of contemporary performance than standing centre stage delivering a monologue in isolation.
The production forces performers to remain alive to the room at all times. You cannot switch off inside immersive theatre.
How does this production fit the long-term ethos of the RT Project?
DIGNITY is essentially our manifesto in performance form.
It combines professional practice, ensemble training, accessibility, experimentation and audience engagement all inside one live process. The show itself becomes the training ground.
We didn’t want to launch with a safe production in a traditional format because the entire point of the project is questioning inherited structures.
Why is The Cause the right space?
The Cause already carries cultural memory inside its walls.
It’s a venue associated with music, nightlife, collectivity and alternative culture. You walk into the space and immediately understand the atmosphere before the performance even begins.
We didn’t want to imitate rave culture aesthetically — we wanted audiences to feel immersed in an environment that genuinely carries that energy.
How does this production restore dignity to the training process?
For us, dignity means recognising performers as artists rather than disposable labour.
Too many early-career artists are expected to work indefinitely for exposure whilst simultaneously funding expensive training and living costs. That model becomes unsustainable and psychologically damaging.
We wanted to create an environment where performers are trusted with ambitious material, treated collaboratively and given meaningful ownership inside the process.
Dignity is about respect. Respect for the work, the audience and the performers making it.
How will the production evolve during the residency?
The residency allows the piece to remain alive rather than fixed.
We’re interested in rotating performers, developing new creative responses, refining audience interaction and allowing future cohorts of performers to enter the process over time.
That’s part of the repertory philosophy: theatre as an evolving organism rather than a finished product preserved unchanged forever.
What do you hope audiences take away from seeing DIGNITY?
Firstly, we hope they have an unforgettable night.
But beyond that, we hope they leave feeling connected — to each other, to the performers and to the idea that theatre can still feel urgent, dangerous and communal.
And maybe we hope they leave asking bigger questions too:
Who gets access to the arts?
Who gets to tell stories?
What happens when whole communities stop seeing themselves represented culturally?
Because ultimately DIGNITY isn’t just about Romeo and Juliet.
It’s about belonging.
DIGNITY runs at The Cause in London from 29th June until 3rd July 2026. For tickets and more information about the RT Project visit https://www.thertproject.com/
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| Benvolio |
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