Mark Rylance put a brilliant acting career on the back burner when he took on the job of running Shakespeare's Globe. So why, asks Lyn Gardner, has he just signed up for another three years?

Lyn Gardner
Guardian

Wednesday August 2, 2000

From the moment the idea of building Shakespeare's Globe popped into the late Sam Wanamaker's head, there was something almost Fitzcarraldo-like about the project. How would Wanamaker find the money to reconstruct an Elizabethan theatre on London's South Bank? If the cash was forthcoming, did anyone really know how to do it? And what was the point of it all?

When the mad dream became a reality three years ago, it was only natural that another visionary should run it. Enter Mark Rylance, a man with a reputation for otherworldliness - a "dark-side-of-the-moon quality", as Terry Hands once put it.

Rylance's only managerial experience was with his own company, Phoebus Cart, which once undertook a sodden tour of The Tempest, performing only on ley lines. As a director, he was best known for a production of Macbeth in which Jane Horrocks's Lady M peed on stage.

There were many doubts about his appointment as the Globe's first artistic director. Yet the choice turned out to be inspired. Rylance is as level-headed as anyone running a theatre in Britain, but he has greater faith than most in his instincts and intuition. It is likely that without him the Globe's opening seasons, which have been subject to the closest scrutiny, would have been as wobbly as the nearby Millennium Bridge.

His success has come at a cost. In the 80s, after a string of thrilling per formances, beginning with the RSC's Peter Pan and culminating in a pyjama-clad little-boy-lost Hamlet, people began calling Rylance the greatest actor of his generation. For once, they were not succumbing to hyperbole.

Whether he was alternating the roles of both the identity-swapping brothers in Sam Shepard's True West, or playing an Ulster Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, the deceptively fragile-looking Rylance was always electrifying on stage. He still is, as his current performance in Hamlet at the Globe attests. He is head and shoulders above the production that surrounds him. If he can give such a riveting performance in a mediocre production, one can only imagine what he would be capable of given a first-class director and a great supporting cast.

But Rylance, 40, has no regrets. His original contract with the Globe expires next year, but he has just announced that he will do the job for another three years. "I've gained so much more than I've lost here," he insists. "I may not have always given such good performances, but I've always learned. I feel connected to a community of other actors and an audience, and that is something no other theatre could have given me."

Rylance is aware that productions at the Globe have not always dispelled the notion of the theatre as a Disneyesque tourist trap or a scholar's plaything. He maintains that while actors are keen to explore the possibilities of the space, directors are more wary of a theatre whose intimate but roofless inn-yard auditorium creates an unfamiliar relationship with the audience. Rylance would love to get really good Shakespearean directors such as Declan Donnellan and Deborah Warner to stage productions. If they don't come, it is not for want of being asked.

He concedes that both Donnellan and Warner in particular "have a puritan aesthetic, and the Globe is a busy aesthetic" but believes that other highly regarded directors may simply be reluctant to surrender control over the audience: at the Globe the closeness of the crowd to the stage means that the audience are never just a passive spectators. Rylance looks rather hurt: "I do think it's funny that so many of the people who supported the building of the Globe now don't seem to want to work here."

If anyone could persuade the doubters to give it a go, surely it would be Rylance, a gentle man held in huge affection by actors. His enthusiasm is so infectious that if he hadn't become an actor, he might have done very well as a cult leader. In fact, in 1995 he both directed and starred in a production of Macbeth at Greenwich in which he played the anti-hero as a devotee of a Hare Krishna-like sect.

Rylance has kept faith with Wanamaker's vision, but sees what is taking place at the Globe as an experiment whose results won't emerge for a long time. He enjoys the fact that the dinky toytown theatre with its wooden beams "looks like a heritage site on the outside, while inside it is the most experimental space in British theatre". We may not agree, but there is no doubt that Rylance has been right to stand firm against critics of the theatre's design, who argue that the lack of a lighting rig and the open roof means that energy is somehow sucked upwards, militating against an exciting theatrical experience.

In fact Rylance says that he began to make sense of the Globe only last year when he played Cleopatra. Then he saw how readily the audience - in broad daylight, and just a couple of feet away - accepted him as the Queen of the Nile. I too have experienced the Globe's strange ability to cast a spell - even during a second-rate production.

The magic of the space resists analysis, but Rylance believes that the Globe challenges both actors' and audiences' preconceptions of theatre. "Peter Hall sees the supporting pillars as an enemy. It's true that not everyone can see everything that goes on on the stage. But everything can be heard. Sound and the spoken word are under threat in our culture and theatre has become very visual - but here we have real storytelling. In other theatres people sit in the dark, their bodies are put to sleep and the focus is all on the concentration of their minds. At the Globe we need stories, and we're still learning how best to tell them."

It is the process of learning that is keeping Rylance at the Globe. "I don't think I've peaked - there is still so much to do," he says. There are plans to build an education centre and the 330-seater Inigo Jones auditorium, which will be lit entirely by candles. Rylance also wants to do more new plays. His total involvement in the theatre is obvious. He is even about to take a tiny part in The Antipodes, the Richard Brome play that opens next week, alongside his starring role in Hamlet.

"It has been a stressful few years, but I'm very happy at the moment. I feel blessed. I have 3,000 people a day coming to the theatre. A lot of them only pay £5 and I have a direct relationship with them. Could you want more?"

A few days after we talk I return to the Globe to see The Tempest. Outside, the place is thick with kids and tourists. It is not a great production, but it is curiously moving. Before it begins, I get into conversation with a couple of Americans. It turns out that they are not regular theatre-goers, have never even seen a play by Shakespeare before. At the interval I bump into them again. The woman's face is shining, transformed. "I was afraid I wouldn't understand a word. But it's so easy. It's just a story, isn't it?"

This is what the Globe is all about. Rylance is right. It is not what critics or academics think that matters. If audiences can go to the Globe and discover that they are not afraid of Shakespeare, then this theatre has really achieved something. What is the point of a theatre that has room for the Ariels but none for the Calibans?