� "Where the Audience is King" by John Peter, (London TIMES, 15 June 1997).

What is happening at the new Globe is both a birth and rebirth. Here is a brand new theatre, born and run without state subsidy, presenting the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in a setting as nearly like the original Globe as it can be without it looking like an antiquarian exercise. The English theatre is returning to its source: to that miraculous period of 70 years when English secular drama was born, flowered, and both created and served its audience.

It is easy to prattle condescendingly about the Globe as a heritage theme park. Not so. This is a commercial enterprise with an artistic purpose: to find out, through live performance, how the greatest body of plays written by one man worked in the theatre and how it appealed to, and was received by, its audience. This is theatrical and cultural history in action.

It is also a process of exploration in its early stages, and there is quite a way to go. But one thing is already clear: we are going to have to partly relearn the language of the theatre, its grammar of power and exchange. When Shakespeare's Globe opened in 1599, one of its earliest productions was Henry V, and it was a stroke of genius by Mark Rylance, the artistic director, to choose this as one of the two opening productions of his own first season. It is a typical creation of the late Tudor era: patriotic but sceptical, triumphalist but also compassionate, both a tendentious piece of political history and grand popular entertainment. In fact, unless you see Richard Olivier's production, you will not know what popular theatre really is.

The term itself is relatively new and already quite debased. If you had described Henry V or, indeed, any of his other plays to Shakespeare as popular theatre, he would not have known what you were talking about. Theatre was by definition popular (with the odd exception such as John Lyly), and the word had no patronising connotation. Today, popular theatre usually means a working-class knees-up, aggressively lowbrow, and flourishing its moral and social membership card by rejecting serious argument, long words and uncomfortable ideas. When Cromwell closed the theatres in 1642 he destroyed a living tradition that was serious, entertaining, commercially viable and classless. It never came back to life.

The England of Charles II was a very different place. The class system as we know it was being born, and English culture and the arts embarked on their long, stately journey towards segregation according to social standing.

There were inequalities, of course, in Shakespeare's time, and this was to some extent reflected in the Globe's ticket prices: the groundlings paid a penny for standing room in the open air, the better off paid sixpence to a shilling for a gallery seat under cover. But when you enter the new Globe, you catch your breath with excitement and realise that its architecture reflects an essential social unity. This is not your usual open-air theatre, but a space that is both open and enclosed. The average Elizabethan was about 8% smaller than we are, and his standards of body comfort were much lower than ours, so that a theatre such as the Globe could hold nearly 3,500 people. But its circular shape gave it a feeling of intimacy on a grand scale. This was its central paradox and its greatest virtue. In this setting, the sense of social differences between the groundlings and the seated spectators would have been minimal.

This is reflected in the dynamics and the aesthetics of Shakespearian drama. Its essence is a brilliant compromise between separation and unity. Size, circular structure and the use of timber make for first-rate acoustics and a gripping sense of immediacy. This is different from the intimacy of studio theatres. The Elizabethan stage was both heroic and humanly proportioned. In Henry V, this is particularly important. I have never heard the Chorus's linking narrative come across with such a powerful sense of a large crowd being addressed. In this theatre you realise, too, that the reception of the French Ambassador by the King, and the Duke of Exeter's speech to the Dauphin are scenes both of private diplo-macy and patriotic rhetoric aimed at the audience.

Rylance himself gives a subtle and politically astute performance as Henry, but he has not quite solved the problem of how a modern actor should balance the double demands of this text in a classical space. There is something powerful but tentative about Rylance's playing. He circles the role like a hunter, sizing up its dangers: it is as if the King himself were wondering whether to face the audience and reveal his character head on. His voice avoids the heroic, and tends towards a relaxed, sometimes even hesitant, modern intimacy, and in this large but close space the effect is actually a little old-fashioned. He is at his best in disguise or in distress: in such moments he gives Henry a vulnerable air, like a very young man carrying very large burdens, a giant-killer at bay.

This is a rousing, powerful production and it got a thunderous ovation. The night I saw it, there was a torrential downpour during Act II. Hardly anybody left. Many of the groundlings took shelter under the eaves, but a hard core of about 50 stayed out there undeterred. In the whole range of Elizabethan literature and documents, there is not one single reference to a theatre performance being rained off: perhaps the Globe will make us rethink our priorities between theatrical excitement and physical comfort.

The other opening play, David Freeman's production of A Winter's Tale, is a drab, dreary and uninspiring affair. There is no sense of magic, nor any awareness that this is an unusual space. King Leontes and his court wander about barefoot in shabby cloaks, some with spi-ky hairdos, which looks bizarre on the sumptuously decorated stage. This is the kind of off-the-peg scruffiness that masquerades as either epic seriousness or classless realism. The Elizabethans would have found it bizarre. Their theatre had hardly any scenery: it was the costumes that made it spectacular. Some theatres paid three times as much for a single rich cloak as for a new play. This is not just antiquarian nit-picking: clothes defined the character's rank, too, and in A Winter's Tale you do need to see the difference between courtly sophistication and rustic innocence.

This is part of the whole difficult problem of authenticity. Clearly, you cannot totally re-create the Globe and should not, even if you could. We speak, hear and move differently from the Elizabethans. Besides, what was the Globe really like? We know a lot about the outside and the auditorium from builders' contracts and such, but there is no evidence, repeat none, about the stage. Was it square and did it jut out so far? We do not know. The stage of the Rose, an older theatre nearby, and excavated eight years ago, had a shallow curve. Was the canopy over the Globe stage held up by pillars? Yes, very likely, but we do not know: it may have been cantilevered, but that would have depended on how deep the stage was, and we don't know that either. And where was the stage? This one is in the northwest, facing southeast, with the result that, during the Winter's Tale matinee, the sun shone in my eyes. The original Globe performances were always in the afternoon: would Shakespeare and his colleagues have wanted to have their audiences blinded by the sun? Again, we don't know, nor are we likely to: English Heritage is doing nothing to stop the development that is going on over the site of the actual Globe a few hundred feet away. It will not even allow keyhole archeology that could still, just, be done. Why? But that is another sad and scandalous story.

The task of the new Globe is to re-create the spirit of Shakespearian theatre: its excitement, its vigorous, classless appeal, and its stylistic and political audacity. It is a superb theatre space. In tense moments, frequently during Henry V for example, a silence descends, an almost palpable silence of hundreds of attentive people close together, such as I have not experienced before.

This is a good place for actors to learn how to handle the text: the acoustics are excellent, but only if you speak clearly. (Winter's Tale company, please note.) Shakespeare wrote his plays to be listened to, not to be read ‚ otherwise he might have published them himself, with the care he gave to the printing of his poems. His greatest innovation, which is so vital that we entirely take it for granted, is the psychologically driven speech. His characters do not make speeches that sound all thought out, ready to be spoken: they express themselves as they think, dramatising the very intensity and spontaneity of the thought process. Henry's soliloquy about the loneliness of kings is one of these, superbly delivered by Rylance.

When the Globe comes to stage the great tragedies, it will have to pay special attention to these speeches, striking a careful balance between direct address and inward meditation. On this great exposed stage, it will not be easy. Actors and directors need to learn more, too, about keeping the action moving fluently: the two hefty pillars can get in the way and clog up the flow. Dramatic rhythm, the ebb and flow of action, is one of the secrets of a great production, and I hope that our foremost classical directors will work here occasionally, as well as our best actors. After all, Shakespeare's own company included the finest actors in the land. The Globe must not become a tourist's curiosity, an historical toy box, but a place of real artistic challenge, of investigation, learning and shared popular excitement. So far, the omens are good.