LONDON - The newly named artistic director of the Globe Theatre does not come across as a director.
Mark Rylance, whom the critics have applauded as the most exciting actor of his generation, does not seem the sort of person who enjoys addressing and controlling large numbers of people. Onstage, he unmistakably projects his personality and voice; off it, Rylance is so softly spoken and self-effacing, one might think this boyish character was a drama student playing the part of an auditor at an audition.
But the very fact that Rylance does not fit stock images of artistic directors sets him apart, and makes one warm to him. This 35-year-old with a Peter Pan-like frame and twinkling eyes is one of life's individuals. He does not put on an act; on the other hand, with his sort of critical acclaim, he does not need to play a role.
He is open enough to admit, with what seems like genuine puzzlement, that talking about himself seems strange:
"The initial impulse to be an actor was not having to talk about myself." But fortunately he does talk about himself, even revealing that he recently learned how concerned his father was that, as a boy of 6 or 7, Rylance junior still had not started to talk properly. No one could understand what he said.
However, his way with words eventually got him places at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and Royal Shakespeare Company. His Benedick in "Much Ado About Nothing" last year won him an Olivier award for best actor. He has also made directors and audiences sit up with productions by his own theater company, Phoebus Cart.
He talks of turning down endless scripts and offers from Hollywood. "I could make a lot of money," he says. But filmmaking bores him - all that waiting around between shoots while somehow having to stay in character for those few minutes of filming.
Money, he insists, does not interest him, though he does have a wife and two step-daughters of 11 and 16 to support.
He lives above a betting shop in Brixton and, at the moment, is into the second week of rehearsals at Greenwich for his production of "Macbeth," which he both directs and takes the title role in (opening Sept. 21).
Grueling daily rehearsals from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. have meant that the workshops the Globe is running in the build-up to next year's official opening are being staged without him.
But he does not take up the post officially until January, and the Globe does not open until June. It was a labor of love for years for U.S.-born actor-director Sam Wanamaker, who emigrated to Great Britain.
It is only after "Macbeth" that he will be able to put his mind to some basic decisions: whether he is going to act in the opening play, and just what that production should be. Definitely Shakespeare, though.
I cannot place his lilting accent. I have to ask him. He cannot place it either - somewhere transatlantic. When he was 2, his parents - both English teachers - emigrated to America. He grew up in Milwaukee and Connecticut, where he went to boarding school, returning to Britain when he got into RADA.
Ironically, the American children would call him the English kid, and RADA contemporaries called him the Yank.
"I've always been the outsider," he says. He cannot remember a time when he was not acting, though there are no obvious thespians in the family. His parents would get involved with amateur dramatics at his school, and his grandfather, a banker at the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, held concert parties in Hong Kong.
Before school, he played imaginary improvisation games with friends. Yet he only realized he might want to do it professionally at the age of 17. He also toyed with the idea of becoming an airline pilot.
He will approach the Globe in an Elizabethan frame of mind, trying to focus audiences as Elizabethans did on the things in life that one normally does not notice. "We miss half of life. So many of us focus on what's visible or provable." He talks of soul and spirit in a way that you expect only Russians to talk, and of taking an audience on a journey down to "an unconscious Hades of confusion" - and then up again. Pretentious? His enthusiasm and gentle voice dispel the thought.
His known interest in mystical matters, such as yin and yang and circles of power, crops up as he draws parallels between the Globe and Stonehenge, with their circular spaces suggesting that journey to hell. He has described the Globe as marking one of the points where Britain's magic ley lines - invisible fields of energy - meet. When he staged "The Tempest" at the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire, inspired by Celtic nature cycles, he consulted a landscape cosmologist. He wanted to know why the stones are aligned in a certain way, exploring the physical and emotional sensibilities he found in Elizabethan philosophies.
Although we live in an age when television and video keep most people indoors, Rylance stresses that the theater will always offer something different - the live experience. And at the Globe it will go a stage further, bringing us theater as social event. In a proscenium theatre, he explains, the audience sits in a dark area looking at a brightly-lit area in a frame. But in the Globe, where you are close to the action and everything is lit by daylight, you're in there with it, he says excitedly. Under his direction, audiences will be free to move around, free to talk and eat and drink.
Directed by research into Elizabethan theater, he wants to dispel the stiff and stilted atmosphere that afflicts theaters even before the curtain goes up. "At the Globe, there won't be nothing happening until the play starts." He talks of "little plays" and a sense of carnival, and of stage characters who will seem like real people. "The Elizabethans were dressed in the same dress as the audience and were based on real people."
Productions may not even have a set. If Shakespeare did not need them, neither does Rylance, who speaks of the academic research being done at the moment into the plays' stage directions. When a character enters "as in a wood," he explains, those words meant "as if in a wood" and for the actors to relate to the space as if altering it. He intends to explore theater of the imagination and awaken aural senses that have been bombarded by visual imagery. "In Elizabethan times, news and information were communicated aurally. There was not such a visual news source. I love words for the quality of their sound."
The irony is that Shakespeare's playhouse is being revived with a director who does not believe Shakespeare existed. So who wrote the plays, I ask? That needs another interview, he answers.
Satur, Sept. 2, 1995 San Francisco Examiner