" Last week I was offered a "friendly warning" in these pages by The Times critic Benedict Nightingale, headlined "stop making a pantomime of Shakespeare". I met Nightingale the following morning on Radio 4's Today programme and had an enlightening conversation as we rode home. I write this article on his recommendation that I clear up a few misconceptions about what we are all doing at Shakespeare's Globe.
In his recent book, Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes writes of Shakespeare, in whom the "sweet, witty soul" of Ovid was said to live again, that what Shakespeare shares with most Ovid is "an interest in passion. Or rather, in what a passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either but passion in extremes - passion where it combusts or levitates or mutates into an experience of the supernatural".
How do we find this in this age of A-level set texts and theatrical criticism which remains as dry as the remainder biscuit after a long voyage? Nightingale questions whether the "authenticity" painstakingly sought by Sam Wanamaker in the building should extend to the bond between audience and actors (What would be the point if it didn't?), and claim that I ask the audience to pretend they are Elizabethans. How ridiculous. On the contrary, I make a point in our programmes of asking them to bring only themselves and measure the play's verity on the scale of their own lives. For if Shakespeare holds a mirror up to nature, how can our theatrical mirror contain anything without our audience's generous willingness to reveal their real lives within our wooden frame?
What I encourage is the following: that my fellow actors play and sometimes talk directly with the audience, rather than to or at them. With implies listening to the audience , which I also encourage, and together as artists we are constantly trying to encourage responses that are involved in the story and let pass those that are self-promoting or undermining of the story. Last year as henry V, I was able to play with the audience as if they were my soldiers in France. They certainly never cheered the killing of the prisoners, as Nightingale asserts. yes, the french nobility were booed for their vanity and self-aggrandisement which cost them the battle; however, French women were not booed but cheered when they stopped Henry in his tracks.
Nightingale chooses a number of examples from this year's repertoire to criticise the audience's reactions, so I attended As You Like It and listened carefully during Merchant of Venice last weekend. He says that in As You Like It apples are "thrown back and forth". What I witnessed was one apple thrown high into the air by the superb John McEnery when as Jaques he observes that "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players". The apple was thrown by a player and caught by a member of the audience, a simple gesture beautifully illustrating the illusionary nature of the division between actor and audience, which Jaques's lines and character suggests, and which this production is actively exploring by treating the entire Globe as the Forest or Court.
For the actor to be at one with the audience in this way encourages a kind of mass complicity in the suspension of disbelief. Engaging daily in this experiment, as my fellow actors and musicians are, we may have more opportunity to observe the incredible subtlety of the new and dynamic relationship the Globe affords the playgoers - 700 of them for a mere 5!
Nightingale is concerned about hissing and booing. So are we. Some members of our audience may arrive completely misled by inaccurate press material telling them that it is a requirement for them to boo and hiss, but the majority willingly exchange the "outside" world for that within the Globe, to become genuine participants in storytelling. Often they wish to make it known when they are displeased with a character's actions.
Most disconcertingly, Nightingale makes four or five criticisms of my company encouraging coarseness in The Merchant of Venice, ending with the sentence "Meanwhile Magni (Marcello Magni) continues to run amok in The Merchant, doing horse impressions, miming death throes, and I don't know what". Well, Nightingale doesn't know what, because to my amazement I discovered he hadn't seen the production, but was just repeating opinions of other critics.
Magni brings a considerable training in the art of Comedia to his role as the clown Launcelot Gobbo, and at that moment is doing exactly what the text suggests, which is to play tricks on his near-blind father. The play is a comedy, and Magni's role is to play the clown. I really was not convinced last weekend that this action hindered or coarsened the audience's judgement of the situation in which Shylock finds himself. They do not boo him when he enters, or at any other point, other than when he turns down the offer of thrice the money which he has loaned to Antonio, and by so doing it becomes apparent that in his anguish he intends to murder Antonio. These are not anti-Semitic boos but disapproval of a character's murderous intent.
The ominous talk among several of "us", as Nightingale reports his sources, in which he asserts that I am encouraging the coarsening of Shakespeare is ill-informed. What I encourage at the Globe is careful research into original playing practices, daily class in movement, speech and verse-speaking during the rehearsal period for the actors, live music which becomes a powerful tool in the absence of lighting and sets, and beautiful, handcrafting Elizabethan clothing.
Our director of education, Patrick Spottiswoode, runs our education department which works with local, national and international schools and education bodies, and we have a prestigious research programme headed by Andrew Gurr. We are also offering the chance to hear plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries that have not been performed for 400 years and we are celebrating those productions in our amphitheatre that now holds 1600 people. Last year Middleton was as popular as Shakespeare.
Our audiences know that we are an unsubsidised theatre, that within it their voice is liberated and powerful, that their participation in coming to "hear a play" is an active one. They are coming in droves. And they are partners with us in an experiment that for many actors and audiences is changing the way they want to meet their Shakespeare.