PLAYING THE GLOBE

 PLAYING THE GLOBE - ARTISTIC POLICY AND PRACTICE by Mark Rylance

Sam Wanamaker used to emphasise to me the wide spectrum of people interested in Shakespeare whom he was able to involve in the Globe project. I now think how wise it was of him, as a matter of policy, not to appoint just one particular person from one particular field of Shakespearean work to run things. Instead, he brought together the Artistic Directorate, a group who would give him guidance and feedback on artistic matters.

I was invited to join in the Artistic Directorate in 1991, when Sam and I met to talk about the group called Phoebus Cart and our production of The Tempest, a project which my wife and I had mortgaged our flat to complete. Sam said we could use the Globe site, which was dormant at the time, a big, wet, hole in the ground, so long as it cost him nothing. Curiously, the Tempest project was, like the Globe, an attempt to draw a community into a very old structure, in this case the Rollright Stone Circle in Warwickshire. For our London performances, we didn’t want an indoor space, but an outdoor circular space of similar dimensions to those of the Stone Circle. Here was a site of such space, with the same near-one-hundred-foot dimensions and north-eastern orientation. Sam and I shared a similar desire to explore old structures for new theatre, but I did not then foresee that I would be invited to join the Artistic Directorate or would be subsequently chosen as Artistic Director. When Sam died we lost the leadership of a man who guided the Globe from many different perspectives, but for the Artistic Directorate especially from the perspective of an actor.

Though born in England, I was brought up about a hundred miles north of Chicago, where Sam lived, and shared for this reason perhaps some of his interests and convictions. I returned to England in 1978 to train as a theatre actor. After my first season with the RSC in 1984 I found myself eager to explore other ways of communicating Shakespeare, and thought a good place to start was with the fundamental company structure of theatre. Seven actors came together to form the parent company of Phoebus cart, called The London Theatre of Imagination, the aim of which was to explore working without a director. We produced Othello on tour, and looking for a space in London found the Bear Gardens theatre, part of what became the International Shakespeare Globe Centre. That was my first introduction to the Globe site, and the first time I met Sam, though only briefly.

I realise now that a democratically-run theatre company of seven profit-sharing actors was unknowingly close to Burbage’s original Globe company. We were looking for different management structures, and different ways of creative working between actors, because in the early eighties there was a great lack of actors’ artistic involvement in productions. We hoped that the shared responsibility for the whole production would inspire more committed involvement from actors. Not all actors desire, or flourish with, greater responsibility. But the role modern directors were shouldering seemed unfairly heavy. Too often they were expected to be fathers, teachers, therapists, patrons, gurus, and many actors had become passive or cynical. The old channels of communication and mutual inspiration between actors had broken down. Work on scenes was too often done only by the director, who frequently had to leave, for financial reasons, as soon as the show opened. One would find oneself acting to the director’s notes rather than through sharing with the other actors and the audience, not in the rehearsal room.

In the eighties, these discoveries did not always come about, due to the working relationships and practices that had developed. Today, one can see many actors leading companies. Perhaps the most notable of these are Kenneth Branagh, who formed the Renaissance Theatre Company, in 1985, also after acting with the RSC, and Barrie Rutter who funded Northern Broadsides. In the London Theatre of Imagination we asked ourselves whether our new ways of working had made any substantial difference to our productions. In working with the Globe, I am as interested in exploring the structure and working practices of the original Globe company as I am in exploring the theatre space itself.

Many believe that Shakespeare’s scripts grew from the experience of playing in the Globe, and the other Elizabethan theatre-spaces, responding to both the actors’ and audiences’ reactions. How the plays were directed, is not known. But every circle needs a centre, even if that centre is still –which is indeed the most difficult kind of director to be. At its best, my experience of working without directors has shown me that it is possible for different members of a company to lead at different times, and in different situations. Some have given good direction in working on scenes, some have been very patient and fair when there have been personal differences, and some have been very good with money and practical matters. No doubt the situation was similar at the first Globe. One wonders who was the centre of the circle in that company. Burbage perhaps, or Shakespeare. Hamlet’s instructions to the players suggest they were not altogether unused to taking direction from outside their ranks, a situation that may not have been all that uncommon, as patrons sought to influence the players to express, for instance, reformation ideas. Yet Hamlet’s instructions concern not only what to act but how, suggesting the actors also had experience of direction from fellow players.

This does not mean that I do not wish to work with directors at the Globe. My experience of working without directors, and more recently of directing from the leading actor’s position, has mightily confirmed my understanding of the need for directors and the difficulty of that role. We do not however want tyrants. Fortunately in the theatre climate of the nineties it feels as if there has been a swing in the conception of the director’s role. Many more directors are now more interested in freedom of communication between actors and audience. For a director to control this communication at the Globe will be, in any case, impossible. There is minimal scenery, no lights, and so many random variables – the weather, planes flying over, and most importantly the direct and much more equal interplay between audience and actors – all of which demand constant adjustment from the actor outside director’s control.

At the Globe, it is the audience who have been recognised and empowered in their creative role as imaginers of the drama. They have been, you might say, allowed into the Bullring. I recently met an Irish story-teller who said that only in story-telling events had he previously experienced the kind of narrative co-creation he had witnessed during the 1996 Prologue season at the Globe. Never before in a theatre. From my early experience in working on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and from talking to the company of Damon and Pythias and to Northern Broadsides (who performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream), I am certain that the relationship between actor and audience at the Globe is genuinely unique and awakening. The same is true of the relationship between audience and audience. At a football match some time ago a perfect stranger turned to me during play and gave me his full opinion of the quality of the game and what should be done about it. I experienced the same easy communication between strangers while watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe. I would make no claims yet for the quality of the communication, but the possibilities are refreshing, and suggest that it may be possible at the Globe to celebrate in a way the simple social pleasures of going to live theatre.

When I played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early nineties I was inspired by the acting work of Mike Alfred and the Shared Experience company. Drawing in a discriminating way on the scholars’ Satan, Stanislavsky, Mike’s work was always directed at enhancing the quality of play between the actors and audience. He tried to achieve a harnessing of intentions and desires as against presenting the idea of a character, a process which at its best creates very lively and flexible play, involving and responding to an audience. The contrast between presentation and play, between showing something and playing it, is another feature that attracts me to experimental work at the Globe. It will be very difficult to ‘present’ a play there, to present a ‘solution’ to a play. An audience responds to the playing. The idea of the word ‘playing’, and a space that demands play, could be very beneficial to the theatre profession. Cinema and television, which pay many actors their livelihood, are in essence mediums of ‘presentation’. They cannot respond to their audiences. To create a space like the Globe, where playing is all, will I hope benefit and refresh theatre performance generally.

When I first acted I would prepare a soliloquy so that I could present it, almost like an internal gymnastic display. Later I found that this kind of formal preparation could easily destroy the subtle drama of discovering together with an audience the mental and emotional life of the character. With discovery, words are found and heard again as if for the first time. Hamlet offers a good instance. Even a speech as well known as "To be or not to be.." can be heard afresh if the actor does not present it as something prepared off-stage, but on the contrary comes on with a need, and discovers with the audience the words for his unspeakable situation. If, that is to say, he almost literally ‘cooks’ it in front of the audience. The Globe, a big, open cauldron of a theatre, is ideal for this kind of ‘cooking’.

Hamlet’s advice to the players is one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have as to the nature of acting at the Globe, especially in its insistence on mirroring nature. It is Shakespeare’s infinite observance of human nature that shakes us so. Yet perhaps we forget that while the presented dumb show has no effect on the guilty King, words make him stand and cry for light. Seeing and hearing the truth seem to produce different effects for Shakespeare. The eye has usually been associated with the mind, the ear with the heart. Shakespeare’s Globe, with its attachment to the word, may therefore place more emphasis on emotional experience than intellectual. The Ghost in Hamlet has little effect on the men who merely see him, but when Hamlet hears his words, as he later confesses, it drives him mad. ‘This distracted Globe’ he names his mind, an allusion that will have added meaning for an audience hearing him in the galleries of the Globe itself. For the actor, it may suggest that where in film he might turn in to speak to himself, in the Globe he might turn out to speak to himself. ‘This wide and universal theatre presents more woeful pageants / Than the scene wherein we play in’ , says the exiled Duke in As You Like It. The scene wherein we play will have particular and moving reference for actors and audiences in the rebuilt Globe.

‘Sit still my soul, foul deeds will rise / Though all earth o’erwhelm them to men’s eyes’, I used to say as Hamlet to the audience, giving them a clear instruction on their role as my ‘soul’ in the drama ahead. Involving the audience emotionally as one’s soul, one’s conscience, is a skill I was taught at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but the space at the Globe facilitates this kind of relationship enormously. The audience can see that I am looking directly at them, speaking with them, inciting them to guide me in the drama.

I have been told that in Greek temples all initiates had to pass between pillars of Hercules, representing the polarised qualities of Mars and Venus, judgement and love (or desire, as Adonis puts it). In Virgil, the pillars of Hercules stand at the entrance to the Mysteries. Acting between the pillars on the Globe stage, with its sign of Hercules, it is as if one is playing a drama which draws an audience towards the mysterious, veiled frons scenae, and behind that Prospero’s cell perhaps, or Rosalind’s forest glade. ‘So, bring us to our palace, where we’ll show / What’s yet behind that’s meet you all should know’ , as the Duke says to close Measure for Measure. Much Ado About Nothing is set in Messina, a location that may serve to draw attention to the Straits of Messina, another of the entrances to Virgli’s Mysteries, penetrated only by the deathly experience of passing between Scylla, the brain-devouring Harpy on the cliff, and the monstrous whirlpool, Charybdis. It could be that the architecture of Shakespeare’s Globe has an intimate connection with the themes of his plays. For instance, the struggle between learning and loving, so brilliantly described in Love’s Labour’s Lost , may at the Globe set actors and audiences playing like Ulysses as he sails between these potent forces of human nature.

The theatre is a place where ideas are floated on emotional energy. The skill of generating emotional energy without it imploding or exploding is the actor’s alchemy. Even with a generally light-hearted play such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, I felt the round space of the Globe very conductive to the generation of emotional energy. Audibility proved not to be a question of volume or even diction, but the movement in the speech. The lack of intervals and time-consuming scenery changes evoked respect for the rhythms of the drama.

We know from Alberti and Vitruvius writing about the Roman amphitheatres, as well as our own experience from the reconstructed Globe, that round or polygonal theatres were designed in this way for their acoustic qualities. At the same time, with minimal or no settings, as at the Globe, the presence of the actor’s physical being, how he is seen, remains very important. The De Witt sketch of the Swan gives a clear impression of the actor’s presence on and around a bench. Indeed, it might be said that the actor’s expressive gestures are the real focus for a drawing so often used only to given controversial information about the structures of a theatre interior.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the director, Jack Shepherd, wanted to create different locations in the audience’s imagination. Given that we were using a minimal number of stage properties, he tried to evoke the locations by drawing on the devices used by the actors to bring the situation to life. There were problems here, sometimes, for the actors. In one scene which we imagined set at cafe tables in an Italian piazza, I became concerned that our physical realisation of the scene was excluding the audience. I started therefore to move around the tables in order to create more visual inroads for the audience. Jack pointed out that my movements were motivated by concern for the audience and not by the reality of the scene or the needs of my character. It is helpful to respond to the audience, as I explained above, in creating a character, or developing a speech, but a commitment to the reality of the scene has to take precedence over any attempt to provide the audience with a pleasing or significant visual rendering of location.

Live theatre is always a mixture of either going out to an audience, or drawing them in, and ideally the actor needs flexibility to adjust to an audience’s imaginative temperament. At the Globe, one’s choices may be more limited than in more recent spaces because of the added narrative responsibility borne by the body. The Japanese are masters of this kind of physical scene-setting, creating whole worlds by behaving as if in a wood or a cell or a palace. For all the Elizabethan love and understanding of the power in words, it is evident from the records of costume expenses alone how important to the players of Shakespeare’s day the visual signals and visual delights of theatre were.

Costuming in the reconstructed Globe presents an interesting paradox. On the one hand it is obvious that Elizabethan actors could not have dressed themselves in the modern clothes of today. On the other hand it is equally true that they usually dressed in the clothes worn by members of their audiences. One of the intentions I intuit in Shakespeare’s work is that he wanted to ground historical narratives and archetypal stories in contemporary human nature – Cleopatra becomes a recognisable woman – and to employ the mundane details of life within mythical structures. In both of these modes he was commenting directly on present day issues from behind the mask of history and myth. Does the use of Elizabethan costume aid Shakespeare’s intentions today? It is a question every production has to ask itself. The drawing of Titus Andronicus showing a cast partly dressed in historical Roman clothing and partly in Elizabethan clothing suggests the presence of layers of reality within the world of a play.

Apart from period costume running the risk of distancing modern audiences in a way that cannot have been intended, if even imagined, by Shakespeare, my fundamental problem with such costume is that it can become so obviously costume rather than clothing. When you wear it as an actor it may not feel like clothes. This can have a subliminal effect, and the actor may then not feel the need to be real either. The King’s Men, I believe, employed on the stage what they considered to be real clothing. We shall certainly, each season, play some productions in Elizabethan or Jacobean costume, but we shall make it, by hand where possible, as clothing, out of materials in use at the time. The rigour of the oak, lime plaster and thatch used in the reconstructed Globe demands this kind of authenticity. Authentic clothing of this kind, rather than theatrical costuming, will encourage the true and detailed playing of human nature that Hamlet demands, and that report seems to suggest vitalised the original Globe.

For me, The Tempest stands at the beginning of the First Folio like an index and introduction to all of Shakespeare’s work. It is a drama which draws heavily on Virgil and on the Hermetic thinking that had thrived in Florence when Ficino worked on the ancient texts of Plato and Plotinus, and which subsequently exercised an influence on a great deal of writing in Elizabeth’s England. The play describes the initiation of the characters through imaginary experience. The remorse necessary to bring about forgiveness is generated in the powerful. The young lover develops visionary wisdom. The sensual servants learn humility. The murderous fish-man Caliban ‘will be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace’. The spirit, Ariel, is released into nature. The Magus gives up his control. I find myself asking whether this initiation through the imagination is what Shakespeare thought of his plays as effecting in the Globe. Or was he inspired by the prospect of money and fame? He doesn’t seem to give money and fame much credence in his plays.

The alchemy-like transformation of lead into gold, as in Romeo’s character, and the cabalistic tree of life which, it may be argued, forms the spine of plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Much Ado About Nothing, were all masks and games of transformation in society and within ourselves. Our world view today forms a very different picture from the Elizabethan. Many now scorn any suggestion of the influence of the heavens on human activity. Modern psychology has tried, with no more than limited success, to interpret and cure the soul. As a classical actor, I naturally have enormous faith in classical drama as enriching and beneficial force in the individual and society.

I am excited to see such a profound force of theatre revived in our day and age. Yet we must not forget that theatrical tools and theatrical form, no matter how authentic and wonderful, are not an end in themselves, and neither is the Globe. The historical architecture and practices of Shakespeare’s original theatre, which we are striving to revive, are tools towards an end, tools of communication. As an actor it is not enough to know how a character speaks. To be authentic one must also know why. Is the desire at any particular moment to stir, soothe, illumine, ridicule? Of course how and why are intrinsically linked in the hand of a great artist such as Shakespeare, and one can illuminate the other. This is the heart of our argument for the Globe. Yet in concentrating how they did it, we must not forget why.

The architecture of the Globe has much to teach about how Shakespeare’s plays spoke to their audiences, and the research of the education and exhibition teams on London culture and society will help to guide us as to why. But all the discoveries about authentic playing practices, at the Globe and the Inigo Jones theatres, however revealing and enabling, will really only bear fruit when they discover not means alone but meaning. My firm belief is that Shakespeare intended that meaning to be found in the imaginary space between audience and actor, hence the absolute necessity to explore the architecture that Shakespeare chose to define that space. I am certain that the space he chose, especially one with a name like the Globe, will help to reveal much meaning through the authentic relationship between plays and audiences.

As the first Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, I hope we can provide theatrical experiences that reflect and enrich human nature in its many physical, psychological, spiritual and divine forms. The wide spectrum of the Elizabethan world picture may have assisted Shakespeare in creating drama that has proved universal in application, while remaining firmly rooted in Nature. The geometric forms of the Globe’s architecture, and the emblematic language of its decorative schemes, have much to reveal about these matters. More generally, I hope we shall empower people, especially young people, by providing them with a language for the unspoken, stories that enrich and encourage change in our lives, and truthful experience of the effects of justice and mercy in human situations.

My own belief is that drama can initiate us into a deeper awareness and more fruitful use of our desire, thought and action. Dr John Dee, the great scholar who taught Lord Leicester, the first patron of a professional playing company in Elizabethan England, described the worlds of desire, thought and action by employing a sun or circle, a moon or triangle, and a cross or square: his famous Monas Hieroglyphica. The Globe, this roughly circular theatre, with its roughly square stage, two thirds revealed and one third hidden behind the frons scenae, and its huge triangular gable supported by the pillars of Hercules, may help us to tap into the meaning of Shakespeare in new and powerful ways. This reconstructed stage and auditorium may demonstrate through lively representation, that loving desires can lead to illuminate thoughts, and that the marriage of love and understanding within our psyche creates actions that are beneficial to life.

This marriage of love and understanding I would call intuition, the development of which is, for me, the goal and fruit of all Shakespearean work, academic and theatrical.

From: "Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt" , edited by J.R.Mulryne and Margaret Shewring