The Great Globe itself; yes, all which we inherit...

I’ve spent a large part of this week squashed (or standing) on the train to and from London, where I’ve been to see Dominic Dromgoole’s KING LEAR, in which Joseph is playing Gloucester, over at Shakespeare’s Globe.Unlike Cornwall, which has been wet and windy, London was basking in sunshine – and with a bare 20 minutes to dump my laptop and overnight things, I raced off to The South Bank to meet Colin and see the show.I love The Globe. Dominic’s doing a great job to widen the creative vision of this significant theatre, and it’s always good to be there. I always stand in the Yard – the only way to experience the work, really – and it never ceases to amaze that the original Globe, which Marlowe must have been familiar with, would have been half the size, with twice the capacity audience.It would have been hot, smelly, noisy and dangerous. The structure is so imposing that it is not really a designer’s theatre, but the arena, the connection between audience and performers is close. Vivid memories of emails from Joe describing his first experiences, in preview for LEAR, of playing that great stage, of the epic feel to the playhouse, of the danger and the magic.I have read accounts of Marlowe’s sometime lover, the playwright Thomas Kyd, who, whilst appearing as an actor in Tamburlaine the 1590s, witnessed death from the stage. The historian Robin Chapman, in his novel Christoferus or Tom Kyd’s Revenge, writes in Kyd’s voice: ‘...the day I played the governor of Babylon was that very day our auxiliary soldiers overshot and killed a woman suckling her child. At first no one could believe it. Minds in a theatre are seldom ready for real hurt. Were these screechings part of the action? Was this another attempt to provide spectacular horror? Her breasts were real and spouting blood. In the pandemonium that followed I was quite forgotten, left to hang on my mock-marble pillar. As they carried the dying woman outside I had time to realise my own good fortune. Why, I could have been her! We never discovered who placed the real bullets in our carbines...’Real death in a theatre where these play-makers played out death and destruction on a regular basis. A rawness.Not so tonight, where the audience are gripped and where standing for over three hours hardly seems to matter. LEAR, at its end, is a catalogue of deaths – putting the ten fatalities in BARABAS into perspective. The gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes make me want to vomit. I fear for Colin; it’s his first visit to The Globe, he’s not great with gore, and he’s so tall and thin that standing for long periods of time makes me worry (has he had enough to eat...?). But when I look round he’s relishing the scene.Joe started working on KING LEAR a week or two after we met, and his first reaction on playing that great stage was the importance of having a close relationship with the audience. Tonight, it is easy to see how readily the audience warm to Gloucester, and I to start to feel excited about the potential to take that kind of playing much, much further.By the end of the show I had started to feel pretty ropey. It’s been a long couple of weeks – only one day off in the last fourteen –a hectic journey to London, and to cap it all, I’ve come down with an ear infection which means I have no hearing at all in my ‘good’ ear and only patchy hearing in the other. Joseph has also forgotten his contact lenses, so it really is a case of the deaf and the blind!Even so, we have a great discussion after the show, into the small hours. We talk, in particular, about the opening speeches of the play, and start to patch together our impressions of how we first want to present Barabas to the audience. There is much talk – inspired by that first speech – of Marlowe’s attitude to money. He never had enough, and suffered throughout his life from the sense of having a chip on his shoulder, the wrong clothes, feeling out of place, feeling ‘other’. BARABAS in many ways is his fantasy about what it is like to amass and lose wealth. The attention to detail that he pays in that opening speech to types of commerce is impressive in its illustration of how well he understood (and coveted) different money-making schemes across the world.On my way back to Paddington the next day, on the bus from south east London, I was struck by the many powerful images of commercial desperation, which are also prevalent in the play. Shops closing down. Sales. Special offers. People feeling the pinch. And this jostling, as the bus moves into SW1, with the glossy richness of Belgravia. A sharp contrast, just as we have in Act One of BARABAS.Am I the only person this summer to see the possible artistic benefits of an economic recession? Transferring this modern resonance on to the stage suddenly feels very exciting...and relevant.