The Royal Shakespeare Company has drawn a line under its highly successful Complete Works year with a wealth of impressive statistics.

The annual report shows that more than 527,000 tickets were sold, earning £34.7 million - £1.6 million better than planned. While the spotlight was on the festival in Stratford, the company also enjoyed one of its best-ever London seasons at the Novello Theatre, aver-aging 94 per cent capacity.

As well as mounting 19 productions of its own for the festival the RSC welcomed companies from around the world, including 16 performing in languages other than English. During the festival more than 37,000 people saw a play by Shakespeare for the first time.

Shows seen in the festival were rehearsed in 15 countries and 27 towns and cities around the world, and many are continuing to be performed.

The RSC/Opera North sonnet project Nothing Like the Sun goes to Ghent and other European Festivals and Sulayman AlBassam's Richard III - An Arab Tragedy to Amsterdam and Paris, while the Dash Arts/British Council production of A Midsummer Night's Dream has been touring the UK.

During the year the company opened its new 1,000-seat Courtyard Theatre in Stratford and closed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for its major reconstruction project.

With building work so far on time and on budget, and Boyd's project to present the complete histories with a single company just completed with the addition of Henry V, the RSC is approaching the end of 2007 in a healthy condition, both artistically and financially.

"The main symptom of health I'm most proud of is that the story about the RSC has been about what's going on a stage, even though we have opened an entire theatre and closed two down," says artistic director Michael Boyd.

"We've managed to launch a season of work - admittedly only in London, which is not good - of six new plays, we've played host to 16 different foreign language productions in Stratford, we have started exploring quite experimental approaches to Shakespeare and we're not bankrupt."

It has been suggested that the Complete Works festival was really a brilliant diversionary tactic by Boyd to prevent the media becoming too preoccupied with the RSC's building works, and he confirms that he always had a gut instinct that the RSC needed a big gesture at this crucial point in its history.

But the festival will leave a lasting legacy in a number of different ways.

"Even this year it was easier for us to invite Silviu Purcarete over to direct Macbett because of the Complete Works than it would have been before.

"Luk Perceval, who directed the German Othello, is going to be working with our company next year, and we're going to be building a major work with Tim Supple's Dash Arts in interesting ways in the next few years. I can't really be more precise than that.

"We are co-producing Twelfth Night with Filter, and they are quite brilliant unorthodox talents that I'm sure we'll be working with more in the future."

The idea of commissioning Leo Butler, Roy Williams and Rona Munro to write plays inspired by Shakespeare themes has set a blueprint for future work with living writers.

"We have a New York writer, Adriano Shaplin, working with the histories company to develop another history play that we're going to do in London - ironically not with the histories company, though their pawprints are all over it. That's a very important legacy, I think."

Meanwhile, passers-by on Waterside may have noticed that part of the external wall of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has been demolished. The roof has also been removed, as have the later additions on the river frontage.

Although Boyd's instinct has been to expect a revision to the opening date - so far the RSC has cannily only said that building work is due to be completed in 2010 - the word he is getting is that the project may well avoid the kind of "completion creep" seen at theatres lie the Hippodrome and Belgrade in recent years.

"It's on time, on budget, and we haven't so far discovered any monsters to deal with," he says. "I'm being told quite realistically now that we are likely to be reopening on time."