Boyd's season will include the tragedies Hamlet and Macbeth

Michael Boyd, who took over the running of the RSC in March of this year, has unveiled a programme which includes work by Shakespeare's Spanish contemporaries.

"The aim is to put that spirit of experimentation and enquiry back at the heart of the RSC," Mr Boyd said.

Next year's season will include a New Work Festival that will premi�re two plays by writers Joanna Laurens and Zinnie Harris.

The company cast will also spend twice as long rehearsing in what the RSC said would "increase opportunities for training and experiment".

Spanish plays

"We're able to paint on a large canvas, working with big ideas in depth over a longer period than is possible for most theatre companies which gives us a responsibility to experiment, to take risks," Mr Boyd said.

"We need to reassert our faith in theatre as a quintessentially collaborative art form, an ensemble where the whole can be so much bigger than the sum of its parts."

Mr Boyd's season will start with a pre-Christmas, family-audience version of Beauty and the Beast, written and directed by the RSC's associate director, Laurence Boswell.

Dame Judi makes her first RSC return after 20 years

The Spanish plays will include The Dog in the Manger by Lope de Vega and Tamar's Revenge by Tirso de Molina.

Six Shakespeare plays will be performed as part of the new season - All's Well that Ends Well, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo & Juliet and King Lear.

Dame Judi Dench will return to the RSC for the first time in 20 years to play Countess Rossillion in All's Well that Ends Well.

Mr Boyd said more than half of the 38 actors who join the ensemble for the season will be allowed to stay on at the RSC.

"We've always had a reputation as somewhere where actors cut their teeth, but now I think we've got a real chance to make coming to the RSC a transforming experience.

"I want actors, at every stage in their careers, to come to the RSC and give performances they didn't know they were capable of," he said.