"Send Out The Clowns at the Globe" by Benedict Nightingale
Apple-throwing and ad-libbing - has the 'authentic' audience participation at Shakespeare's Globe gone too far? Benedict Nightingale is worried - ( LONDON TIMES, 3 August 1998)
The other day a foreign student was walking into the replica of Shakespeare's wooden O on Bankside when she was grabbed by a bizarrely dressed man. He was Marcello Magni, the Italian clown who was about to play Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, but she did not know that. Why was this tiny, frenetic lunatic seizing people's sandwiches, pouring water over them, and behaving in ways that in nice sedate countries would have people phoning the police and asking for the straitjacket squad? The girl freaked out, and had to be taken by ambulance to hospital.
Not a very serious affair, maybe, but one that reactivates a worry which had begun to gnaw at the front as well as the back of my head. Is what is ponderously called "audience participation" going to spoil work at Shakespeare's Globe in ways that rainstorms and passing helicopters have failed to do? Are we en route to the Hamlet in which Claudius makes V-signs at the groundlings, and the groundlings yell "Go for it, boy" at the hesitant prince? As Mark Rylance's theatre begins its previews of two new productions, Dekker's Honest Whore and Middleton's Mad World, My Masters, it is time to offer him a friendly warning. If things continue the way they are going, the artistic director had better have several ambulances on standby, just to take serious playgoers to a place where the blood-pressure can be professionally reduced.
Let's instantly agree that the Globe, now in its second full year, is in many respects proving a great success. There have been enjoyable productions, such as the As You Like It still in the rep, and good performances, not least from Rylance himself as a sly yet forlorn Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona and a hilariously comfy, smug cuckold in Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside. But how does he feel when he stands in the Doge's court as Bassanio in the current Merchant of Venice, and hears Shylock booed and his forced conversion to Christianity received with the same cheers that have apparently sometimes greeted the grossly anti-Semitic Gratiano? Well, maybe there was the same reaction back at the time when Dr Lopez, Jewish physician to the Queen, was being tortured to death for allegedly plotting against her.
From the start, Rylance has made it clear that he wishes his groundlings to feel as free as their Elizabethan predecessors to move about, heckle, even chuck orange peel at the stage. He can also reasonably point to the configuration of the Globe, which thrusts actors out deep into the audience and, unlike today's proscenium-arch playhouses, forces them to acknowledge the spectators' existence even at intimate moments. So why not make an aesthetic virtue of theatrical necessity?
Some such reasoning doubtless lies behind the exercises in sharing now to be found at the Globe. In As You Like It, apples are thrown into the audience and returned with interest. The wrestling match between Orlando and Charles doesn't merely spill into the pit, but ranges around it, sending groundlings spinning as fall follows fall. There are hisses for wicked Duke Frederick and bad Oliver, and loud spoof sighs for poor, rejected Silvius. Meanwhile Magni continues to run spectacularly amok in The Merchant, doing horse impressions, miming death-throes and I don't know what.
Last year it was much the same. The audience made its feelings about the Agincourt campaign very evident. The dastardly Gauls were booed and even Henry V's decision to kill his prisoners cheered. If a French couple had come to the Globe via the provocatively named Waterloo, they would have concluded their nation was spiritually at war with England, and gone straight back to Paris. That way, they would at least have avoided the excesses of Chaste Maid, in which Elizabethan Londoners were ad-libbing about Peter Mandelson and chasing one another round the Globe's balconies and almost up to its thatched roof.
I don't think I'm being a killjoy, a pedant, or both, when I say it is time for Rylance to draw back. The first, most obvious reason for a rethink is that plays are in danger of being more coarsened than a big, tall theatre open to the sky makes inevitable.
One critic felt that the morally intricate hostilities between the Jewish and Christian factions in The Merchant had been reduced to the level of "an Arsenal-Tottenham football day", and several of us have talked ominously of a house-style that tends to push even Shakespeare towards melodrama or panto. An audience which jeered Iago or yelled "Look out, he's lying" to his victim would doubtless be an involved audience; but they would be unlikely to end up with a very searching, subtle Othello.
Maybe the reason the Jacobeans rated Shakespeare no higher than his contemporaries is that the plays they saw were a lot more crudely staged, performed and received than is the case today. And here we come to the nub of the problem. Should the authenticity the late, great Sam Wanamaker wanted at the Globe really extend from the building to the bond between actors and audience? Indeed, how can it do so?
These days the groundlings are not the smelly, seething mix of apprentices, workmen, layabouts, rakes, prostitutes and pickpockets that enraged the Elizabethan puritans, but a mainly middle-class blend of students, backpackers, Japanese tourists, American professors and people unwilling or unable to get a £15 or £20 seat.
The result is self-consciousness, phoney role-playing and confusion. When David Rintoul's Duke Frederick points menacingly at his hecklers, or John McEnery's Jaques hurls another apple out at the audience, they are provoking us in ways that Shakespeare's company would surely have found artificial, absurd, even dangerous. Meanwhile the Globe's ushers, conscious to a fault of modern fire regulations, are busy warning off those groundlings who block the exits by perching on the stairs. For all its belief in freedom, there is a lot of control at the Globe. At times it verges on infantilism.
The groundlings in particular are being simultaneously asked to pretend they are Elizabethans and encouraged to behave as if Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf were onstage. So what will happen when the Globe, which has so far confined itself to comedy, history and the odd Jacobean thunderer, finally tackles one of the great tragedies?
Let's hope patterns of behaviour at the theatre are not yet fixed. Let's hope the major directors and actors who have yet to test their talents there will succeed in creating an emotional intensity which will banish self-indulgent silliness. The roguish Lear, the rompish Macbeth are too awful to contemplate.