At long last, the vagabonds and sturdy beggars of the U.K.’s Royal Shakespeare Company are getting access to the kind of class that can only come from at least a nominal connection to a major Hollywood prestige TV network or streamer. Which is to say that Variety is now reporting that the RSC is gearing up to put on a prequel play to George R.R. Martin’s Game Of Thrones. Titled The Mad King, the play is set 18 years before the start of Martin’s series, during the fabled Tourney At Harrenhal, and is being adapted by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke—with Martin on board to say nice things about Shakespeare to keep the literary nerds at bay.
“For me,” the author is quoted as saying, “The RSC was the obvious choice when thinking about putting a Game Of Thrones story on the stage. Shakespeare is the greatest name in English literature, and his plays have been a constant source of inspiration to me and my writing. Not only that, he faced similar challenges in how to put a battle on stage, so we are in good company. It will be thrilling to watch the events of this new play unfold in a live environment.” See? Absolutely no reason to get mad about the Royal Shakespeare Company going all Stranger Things: The First Shadow here!
But, no, we kid Martin, the RSC, and the sum total of all meaningful English literature: If you were to take an event from the backstory of A Song Of Ice And Fire and put it on the stage, the Tourney At Harrenhal would be a hard pick to top. Only glimpsed, in the original books, in memories and stories, it’s the point where the fragile peace existing around the increasingly mad King Aerys II tipped over into bloodshed and disorder, the violence of Robert’s Rebellion that then gave way to the uneasy status quo in play when A Game Of Thrones begins. At the same time, it’ll give audiences a direct view of two key characters who exist, in Martin’s books, only as either legends or in the memories of aging and miserable men: Rhaegar Targaryen, prince of the realm, and the woman he stole, Lyanna Stark.
Some of this chronology is, admittedly, a bit muddled by the Game Of Throne TV show—which stated definitively things that Martin had only ever written in implication, most notably the pair’s apparent illicit love for each other, and their parentage of alleged bastard son/royal heir Jon Snow. But Lyanna, especially, is a character who exists only in reflection in Martin’s books, a symbol of youth and regret for men who went on to murder and dishonor themselves in her name. Seeing the character actually speak for herself should be a treat—and that’s before we get to rich backstory mysteries like the question of the Knight Of The Laughing Tree.
And, whoops, there we go actually getting ourselves excited for the play, which is set to debut at Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer of 2026. Sure, Martin’s not actually writing it, with Macmillan doing the actual adaptation. But given how incredibly, HBO-PR-pulling-their-hair-out vocal the author has been about his collaborators deviating from his plans of late, it’s hard not to imagine that anything less than rigorous canonical standards will be applied to the stage production when it finally goes live.
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