YORK Theatre Royal is to transform its main auditorium into a theatre-in-the-round from May to November next year with an ensemble company of actors for the season.

The decision was taken on the back of artistic director Damian Cruden re-configuring the stage from a proscenium arch design into the round for this summer’s production of The Wind In The Willows, where the set was built over the stalls seating.

The Theatre Royal’s biggest ever ensemble season will involve a core company of 12 actors who will perform in both main-house and studio shows over the seven-month period.

The season will open with one of Cruden’s favourite plays, Arthur Miller’s McCarthy witch-hunt polemic, The Crucible, from May 7 to 28. “Until now, I’d never been able to do The Crucible, which I would only countenance doing in the round, and the other plays have followed on from there, as the theatre could not be in the round for only one show,” said Mr Cruden.

Ironically, his commitments with his America-bound, ever-expanding production of The Railway Children will preclude him from directing Miller’s play, the task going instead to the theatre’s associate director, Juliet Forster. Her company of 20 will include eight graduating students from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, after a successful collaboration with the Theatre Royal for The Seagull in April this year.

From June 3 to 25, the main house will present the first ever stage adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s novel, My Family And Other Animals, wherein Durrell looks back at his unconventional upbringing on Corfu.

Anthony Minghella’s Two Planks And A Passion will be co-produced with York Christian theatre company Riding Lights from July 1 to 16 to mark the start of a partnership between the two companies and York Museums Trust that will culminate in the York Mystery Plays returning to the Museum Gardens in 2012.

Minghella’s play within a play tells the story of the Guilds of York preparing to perform the York Mystery Plays in 1392, and the Theatre Royal production will feature a community cast.

Next summer’s big family show from July 29 to September 3 will be a new adaptation of J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, written by Mike Kenny, the York writer already responsible for the Theatre Royal productions of The Railway Children and The Wind In The Willows and newly commissioned to write the 2012 version of the Mystery Plays.

From September 23 to October 15, the Theatre Royal will stage Leeds playwright’s Alan Bennett’s school play Forty Years On, in which staff and students present the Albion House Dramatic Society revue with humorous consequences.

As part of their on-going residency at the Theatre Royal, Belt Up Theatre’s actors will play the pirates in Peter Pan and the pupils in Forty Years On.

Stan and Ollie will be reborn in Laurel And Hardy, Tom McGrath’s homage to the comic duo, who are stuck in a waiting room somewhere between death and eternity, from October 21 to November 5. Martin Barrass, the comic stooge to Berwick Kaler’s dame for 25 years in the Theatre Royal pantomime, will return to one of his most memorable roles as Laurel. “It’s been a long-held ambition of mine to see Martin play Stan Laurel again,” said Mr Cruden.

The 2011 ensemble company also will perform in two Studio productions, both to be directed by Katie Posner, associate director of company-in-residence Pilot Theatre. From the writer of London hit Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth, comes Parlour Song, a black comedy of deceit, paranoia and murderous desires in a typical suburban street, from June 30 to July 23.

David Harrower’s Blackbird will run from October 20 to November 12 in a co-production with Pilot of this unflinching portrait of an abuser and the abused, a 40-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl. “Dealing with the issue of abuse, it asks a lot of questions of all of us,” says Katie, introducing a play that won the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.

For tickets, phone 01904 623568 or book online at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk