Yacht Mollymawk

During our recent visit to England, Xoë was delighted to have the opportunity to visit the Globe Theatre. This experience inspired the following article.

It was a dreamy golden evening, soft and thick after the day’s blare. Looking along the lazy length of the Thames, we pointed out the thin arches of bridges to one another. The buildings of London stacked away, seeping into the distance, and all the air thrummed with traffic.

The Globe Theatre was incongruous amid brick and stolid Victorian stone. A tall circle of black and white timber framing, topped with thatch. My father, my uncle and I looked at it, looked at each other.

“It’s a bit …” I didn’t know what to say.

The Globe which now sits awkwardly on the on the south bank of the Thames is a modern reconstruction, opened in 1997. The original Globe was constructed in 1599, using the wooden beams from an earlier theatre. It was owned by a group of actors, one of them Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s part in the Globe was a rather small one, however.

The original Globe Theatre was a ring of thatched wattle and daub, with an open space in the middle. This space, known as the yard or pit, would have been where the poorer people stood crushed together, splitting nuts and swigging and spilling ale. The gentry could sit in the three tiers of galleries which curved around the wall, sheltered by the strip of roof.

The square stage stuck out from the circle of wall into the yard. A thatch and a painted ceiling sat on sturdy pillars over it. Trapdoors would have opened in the floor and in the roof of the stage, so that actors could push up the boards and climb out of the ground, or drop on a struggling rope from the heavens.

Most of Shakespeare’s later plays were staged at the Globe. In 1613 his Henry VIII, the last play he wrote, was put on there. During a performance of Henry VIII, a cannon used in the show went off wrong, breaking a beam, and the thatch began to burn. One person was hurt in the fire, a drunkard, who, realising that his breeches were on fire, slopped his beer over them.

The Globe was badly damaged by the blaze, but by 1614 it had been rebuilt. Plays were acted there until 1642, when it was closed down, with many other theatres, by the Puritans. In 1644 the Globe was dismantled to make room for other buildings.

Until 1989, the location of the Globe Theatre was unknown. Then some workers, building a car park, came across its remains. Sam Wannamaker, an American actor and director, decided to reconstruct the theatre, basing the building’s structure on the remnants of the original Globe. He also used surviving drawings and descriptions of the original theatre.

The reconstruction, called Shakespeare’s Globe, stands some 200 metres away from the site of the old theatre. It has a modern ticket office, and it has more extensive backstage rooms than were built into the first Globe, but otherwise it is similar to the original. Black timber framing crosses over on the white wall, and a ring of thatch shelters the galleries - the first thatched roof to be allowed in London since the Great Fire. Sprinklers are stowed in the straw, a measure taken to prevent a flare like the one of 1614.

In Shakespeare’s theatre, you could stand in the pit for a penny, but in the modern Globe a yard ticket costs £5. There are 700 places in the yard, and a further 600 tickets for the galleries - 1, 300 places in all. The original Globe was roughly the size of the present one, but it would have had over twice this number squashed into it. An audience might amount to 3,000 people. Health and safety regulations limit the places which can be offered in the modern theatre.

Plays are produced at the Globe every summer. They generally run from May until October. There is always something of Shakespeare’s on, and more modern plays are also staged there.

We had come to the Globe, on this rich, sleepy evening, to see a performance of Othello. My father had found the theatre’s website, and, being desperate about all forms of Shakespeare, I had fluttered and pleaded him into buying us tickets for the yard. I don’t think I had really pictured the Globe; it surprised me when I saw it.

“It’s a bit …daft.”

We walked into the small squatting ticket office. A neat girl sat with a computer behind a pane of glass. We went out of the sliding doors which sucked across for us, and the theatre was more ungainly than ever. People chatted around it, wore flared jeans, drank from paper cups.

We pushed through the crowded little door, into the shove around the stage. A fiddler and a piper sat on a bench on the platform, wearing rough copies of Tudor clothes. They sawed out a creaky little tune.

It was a hideous stage, really, I thought, fat pillars of red marble, frills of gold, the lurid ceiling painted with pink figures, the false papered brick backing. We stood in the folds of people, waiting. The tune scraped out. The open sky above us deepened and purpled, and stars pricked it.

Easier, now, in the wood and daub, the galleries stacked on posts, the garish platform, old-fashioned clothes on the fiddler, not to notice the traffic’s throb. We waited.

Then two men barged onto the stage, shouting, and the play began.

That play, closed in among the crowd, with the actors on the platform or pushing through the people, was a real, noisy, smelly thing. Shakespeare’s language seemed easy, in the timber and thatch, the squashed, standing audience, the slashed doublets and swords. The plot pulsed around me, packed in with the peasants, and the gentry in the gallery stirred slightly in my mind.

When we struggled out of the door, spilling with praise, the sharpness of electric bulbs stumbled me. I looked back at the theatre, soft in shadows, but splashed here and there with the hard light. The gaunt building beat with the words of the play, the costumes, the crush, and there was something empty about the brick and the tarmac parked with cars.