Sunday, August 10, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

LONDON -- To build the living replica of Shakespeare's Globe, which now attracts thousands daily to the South Bank of the Thames beside the new Tate Modern, it took decades. The original Globe, though, was built in a relative instant.

	If you go ... All five plays at the Globe continue in alternating repertory through Sept. 27. The performance schedule and other programs are described on the Globe's Web site. The 600 standing places in the pit cost 5 ($8); the 881 seats on staggered wooden benches rising on three levels range from 13 to 29 ($20.80 to $46.50; take off 2 for seniors and students). Call 011-44-20-7401-9919 or visit www.shakespeares-globe.org.

When the young William Shakespeare started to work in London as an actor, the Lord Chamberlain's Men performed at The Theatre, an open-air playhouse they owned in Shoreditch, just northwest of the old City of London. By 1596, the company was in dispute with its landlord over the renewal of the lease. Landlord in those days meant just that: lord of the land where the building sat. He figured he had the company over a barrel, since it could hardly move its theater.

But at Christmas, 1598, the company did just that. Working very fast, they disassembled the timbers of The Theatre and ferried them across the river to a new plot of land on the South Bank, the loosely regulated red-light district. When it opened in 1599, they called the new theater the Globe.

The old landlord sued, charging theft and riot and adding other slurs actors have long endured. But three years later the suit "died of exhaustion," as they say. And the company took on new partners, including Shakespeare.

Half of his plays had already appeared, but those continued in repertory, and the Globe saw premieres of the other half, including all the great tragedies. The Globe burned down, was rebuilt and torn down within 50 years, but its Shakespearean legacy came to be accepted as the greatest achievement of English and perhaps world drama.

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Fast-forward 350 years to the arrival in London of an enthusiastic 30-year-old American actor, Sam Wanamaker. He asked a taxi driver to take him to the Globe as if to a holy site, but there was nothing to see but a blackened bronze plaque on the wall of a nearby brewery.

So Wanamaker embarked on a personal crusade to rebuild the Globe. First ignored, then condescended to, he gradually came to be accepted. When I interviewed him, age 71, in 1990, the Globe's foundations had been laid, a few hundred yards nearer the river than in 1599, although the building itself was marking time, in order to benefit from study of the newly discovered foundation of the nearby Rose Theatre and the original Globe.

"The physical nature of the Globe is going to break down a lot of barriers," Wanamaker told me. "We are ... returning Shakespeare to his own people." He referred to the standing room surrounding the Globe stage, where playgoers of every class jostled in the sunshine.

There was a long scholarly battle over the shape of the building, size of the stage and every detail of the construction, which was carried out with as close-to-the-original hand-craft techniques as possible. When Wanamaker died in 1993, the Globe was finally rising in its oak, lath, plaster and thatch purity.

Shakespeare's theater was actor-driven, with nothing like a modern stage director. So an actor, Mark Rylance, was appointed in 1995 to be the first (and still only) artistic director of the Globe's resident company.

In 1991 at Pittsburgh Public Theater, Rylance played Hamlet -- pajama-clad, scruffy, intensely moving. This fall, Rylance's Globe company will tour five U.S. cities, Pittsburgh included. Its "original practices" production of the comedy "Twelfth Night" will play Nov. 12-16 at the Cultural Trust's new Theatre Square building on Penn Avenue.

Under Rylance, the Globe has stayed loyal to Wanamaker's original vision. As the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, it fosters research and education while maintaining a permanent exhibition on the theater of Shakespeare's London. But the main research takes place in the theater, where performing and viewing challenge expectation and expand our understanding of the plays.

Playing under the open sky, the Globe performs only May through September, using natural daylight or, at dusk, supplementary lighting on both stage and audience. Some productions use "original practices," some modern practices and some experimental blends.

This year is named the Season of Regime Change, echoing the upheaval of 400 years ago, when the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I died after 45 years, to be succeeded by the Stuart James of Scotland. As Rylance points out, 2003 also knows something of regime change and associated fears and violence.

He defines this year's plays as exploring change in government, marriage and religion: Shakespeare's "Richard II," "Richard III" and "The Taming of the Shrew" and Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II" and "Dido, Queen of Carthage." Two are performed by an all-male company, two by an all-female and one by a mixed one.

Although I have visited the Globe site annually since it was a gleam in Wanamaker's eye, this was my first time to see it in performance. You approach the theater through a foyer, all light wood and glass, up a half flight of stairs, past the book shop and cafe, out into a small courtyard. The Globe rises before you, white plastered and oak timbered, unnervingly close to all those conjectural images in the books. Booths sell soup, nuts, dried fruit, ice cream and drinks; attendants rent cushions for 1 and hand out paper sun hats. The crowd is festive.

"Richard II"

One of the knocks on the Globe has been to call it "heritage theater" -- what we'd call a theme park, ersatz. As "Richard II" began, I had a sinking feeling: The stage fills with a procession complete with a deer carcass, and I wondered if this were some pre-show "merrie olde England" ritual.

But instantly Richard II himself (Rylance) steps forward, and the familiar text begins. The procession dramatizes Richard's feckless confusion of personal pleasure with the business of government. Rylance's Richard begins as a lightweight -- pouting, indulging his own jokes, daring (as the role requires) to alienate us with his selfishness and negligence. But gradually he gravitates toward pathos. Rylance's tenor voice plays loosely with the verse, cutting across the rhythms but always finding the logic of meaning and character.

The main revelation in seeing the Globe perform for the first time is the actor-audience relationship. Since we are lit, the actors bring us into the action or not as they choose. We become the crowd gathered to watch Bolingbroke and Mowbray fight, the realm John of Gaunt invokes or even the commons Northumberland refers to in the deposition scene. On Richard's return from Ireland, he makes us into the earth he says will rouse to defend his crown.

We are all those things, of course, not just in the make-believe of the play but in the real space of the theater -- we are there to watch, and as much as we play Richard's subjects, we are gladly Rylance's. It is astonishing how the audience loves him.

I heard none of the phony cheering and booing that might go with theme park enactments. There are titters on the appearance of the male Duchess of Gloucester and the Queen, especially because the latter is taller than Richard. But mainly the audience is rapt. The silence is perfect as the large crowd focuses on Richard's Hamlet-like speculations on death.

The company is happy to play the comedy. Many small details show comic sense and a lively care for character. "Master of Play" Tim Carroll is presumably responsible, but the company itself is empowered. I was interested to see one actor flub a line by substituting a wrong name, and a fellow actor adjust his speech to endorse and not expose the error.

The actors move boldly around the stage, making it expand or shrink as the scene demands. They make big circular entrances and exits, sweeping around the pillars to show themselves to the whole audience, timing it so the next scene can start instantly at another door.

Kudos to John McEnery's crusty John of Gaunt and garrulous Gardner and to Liam Brennan's stalwart Bolingbroke. This is basically the same company that will come to Pittsburgh with "Twelfth Night."

The courtiers' clothing is highly colored with elaborate hats, very much in line with the "fashions in proud Italy" attacked in the text. In keeping with Shakespeare's practice, all the design details, including the live music by cornets, sackbuts, dulcian, natural trumpets, drums, violin, recorders, tabor and flute, are pitched to 1600, not to the period of Richard's life, 200 years before.

Richard puts up a terrific fight at the tragic end, and Bolingbroke is ultimately left alone with the empty crown and throne. But the performance really ends with a vigorous dance -- a stamping, pivoting display by the whole company, full of leaps and claps. It is infectious, Rylance bouncing with more energy and joy than anyone, then he and Bolingbroke facing off for a combination duet and duel.

"Richard III"

This is "original practices," too, except the company is all women. The justification is mainly experimental but also Shakespearean. Although the professional theater of his day was single-gender, men were played by women -- even though those women were played by men. Presumably, only the law kept Shakespeare from employing women. And "Richard III" pictures some very strong women who claim their role in history.

But there are many more male roles in "Richard III" than female in "Richard II." And we are less used to see women play men than vice versa. In all-male Shakespeare, I generally forget it's a man in the dress; that never happened in this "Richard III."

Part of the difficulty is Kathryn Hunter's Richard, which is gnarled and grotesque, a true gargoyle. This Richard hops, prances and canters. He is such a "bottled spider" and "hunchback toad" it is hard to believe anyone would take him seriously as king.

Presumably that's the theatrical point. Richard is a psychotic but also an audience-involving comic villain. I can't believe the original audience could have been so cynical as to cheer such a villain, but this one does. Strange as it is, Hunter's portrait is compelling. Some others are strong -- Rachel Sanders' Queen, for one. But too many seem like girls' school Shakespeare -- tall, well-spoken prefects or team captains just making believe.

Just as "original practices" has been stretched to admit women, costumes are pushed back from Shakespeare's day toward the century earlier when this play is set, and the program cites 1598 justification by the great Edward Alleyn. The music is here more predominantly drums, plus hautboys and voice.

The production by "master of play" Barry Kyle is best when most theatrical. Hastings' head drops on stage with a satisfying thud. The Mayor addresses us from a soap box in the pit. Indeed, the theater becomes a meeting house, a town hall. You can see why the original Elizabethan privy council feared it: You feel energized and informed, not the lumpen mass the government preferred.

"Dido, Queen of Carthage"

Here's something very different, a text rarely done but a familiar production style. Whereas both "Richard" plays use companies of 15, with one actor doing as many as five roles, here, six actors and actresses do it all. Dressed in modern clothes -- sometimes witty, as when Venus wears yellow lingerie or Juno, giant gold shoes -- they get to play with a huge steel slide down from the upper level, a jungle gym at mid-stage and tables of colorful props.

Marlowe's text is cut to just 2 1/4 hours. The story-telling includes doll puppets, actors who freeze and then turn into someone else and gods who blow bubbles to celebrate Dido and Aeneas' love. There's some gorgeous verse -- this is Marlowe, after all. But it's a static story, more like the formal heroic drama of the later 17th century.

Here, the music is modern, composed by Claire van Kampen (Rylance's wife), but based on Purcell, who wrote a "Dido" opera himself. There's much mournful underscoring, and when Dido takes to her funeral pyre, the music is gorgeous.

Were this the one show I'd seen at the Globe, I'd wonder about the fuss. But not even this weakest piece is predictable tourist theater: Each production is imbued with a questing spirit.

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