It may soon be too late to book tickets to see David Tennant tackle Shakespeare's flawed and doomed King Richard II: many of the seats for both Stratford-upon-Avon and London have already been sold, even though it doesn't open until next autumn.
But the Royal Shakespeare Company is to announce on Tuesday that the production will be relayed live to cinemas around the world – and also streamed, free, into 1,000 British schools.
Tennant, who will be returning to the RSC for a fourth season, the first since his sold-out performance as Hamlet, said he found the prospect of tackling the play "daunting … but very exciting".
The RSC is coming late to live broadcasts, which have already proved major successes for opera, ballet and theatre companies internationally, and the British Museum is joining in next month, with the first live broadcast of its blockbuster Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition to 220 UK cinemas. But the RSC director, Greg Doran, said he has been interested for years in the best way to convey the immediacy of theatre through the medium of film.
"I've been thinking about this ever since Antony Sher and I filmed our production in South Africa with Anthony Sher as Titus Andronicus," he said.
"It's a magnificent opportunity to share the experience of live theatre with the widest possible audience, but I think it's very important that we find a way of re-imagining it for film; it mustn't just be like having a security camera peering at the stage.
"I also want to find a way of capturing something of the special experience of watching Shakespeare in his own town – there is something about Shakespeare in Stratford, this is the air that he breathed.
"The film of the 1959 production of the Dream opened with Charles Laughton, who played Bottom, out in the streets of Stratford, and the camera then follows him into the theatre – where you see a very young, slim Peter Hall sitting at the back of the stalls. I like that idea of opening the theatre out into the town. Maybe this time we'll start with David wandering around the souvenir shops buying fridge magnets."
The production, opening at Stratford in October, and the broadcast in the UK, North America, Australia, Japan and northern Europe, will be a highlight of Doran's first full season as artistic director at the RSC, and the first in a complete new cycle of the history plays, which will all be filmed. The production will be filmed on 13 November. On 15 November it will be streamed to schools, followed by a live Q&A introduced by the TV presenter Konnie Huq.
Tennant first performed in Stratford in 1996 as a 25-year-old, and was last seen – after the television series Doctor Who made him a major star – as an admired Hamlet. But, like Doran, he goes much further back with Richard II: he first saw Derek Jacobi in the role when he was a schoolboy in Glasgow.
Doran was also a schoolboy when he first saw the play, in another famous production in 1973 when Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson alternated the roles of the king and his ultimately mortal enemy Bolingbroke.
"It had a tremendous impact on me," said Doran. "I was absolutely gripped by the play – when we did it at school, I played Richard, I was determined to play it.
"This play is all about the extraordinary language, it is Shakespeare's lyric tragedy – and David, with his wonderful facility for language, has the capacity to be great in it, I am confident."
• This article was amended on 31 May 2013. The original first paragraph said: "It's too late to book tickets to see David Tennant tackle Shakespeare's flawed and doomed King Richard II: every bookable seat for both Stratford-upon-Avon and London has already been sold, even though it doesn't open until next autumn". That was incorrect: there are still some tickets available. The subheading, which originally referred to "Sold-out performance", has also been amended.
