I was walking back along the South Bank the other day from the Globe Theatre. It was 11 oclock at night and there was a crowd of people peering over the railings by Gabriel’s Wharf down at the beach below. There was a man sitting there on a sofa, a table in front of him and a table on either side and on them a bowl of fruit and candles. And everything but the candles was made out of sand.
I walked a little further and there was another crowd, this time outside the National Theatre, watching a full-scale opera, with full sound effects, explosions and gushing water.
There was also a weird haunting sound coming from what may have been a (stationary) boat on the river, or even Somerset House. It was strange, ambient stuff, not the sort of thing you’d go to hear at a concert. Maybe I imagined it.
It’s good to be back in London.
The Thames beach outside Gabriel’s Wharf
The theatre
Each summer, with a bit of luck, I get to teach a course on live theatre to American students visiting London. I choose and take them to see a mixture of shows – large, small, West End, fringe and of course, the Globe.
It is a wonderful job. If I can be totally serious for a moment, there is no other city in the world to compare with London when it comes to theatre.
Theatre gets knocked about a bit, a lot, mostly by the critics. I know theatre needs them, not so much as they need theatre of course, but every month you read of “theatre’s demise”, or “the death of the West End”. I gather four out of five shows in the West End do not recoup their costs, which is an amazing statistic – no other business would survive those sort of figures; but then theatre is not like any other business, it’s not really a business, not at its heart.
When I see this city and the theatre through the eyes of the visiting Americans I am so proud I almost grow feathers. I could teach for fifty-two weeks of the year and still not find the time to take them to see everything.
Then there is the Globe. The Globe has its detractors, many of them from the theatre biz itself; but if you have ever been with a group of American students, or I suspect any students, who arrive there with a deep prejudice against ‘boring’ Shakespeare because they’ve have been forced to study him in the classroom, and then seen the look on their faces three hours later, after three hours of standing on solid concrete, you would, I promise you, think the Globe the most amazing theatre in the world.
It’s true some of the productions are crowd-pleasing, and the ‘Merchant of Venice’, for me, was one of them. I do sometimes wonder if there are any depths to which they will not stoop to get a laugh.
But it is such a special place, you’d be churlish not to enjoy simply being there. There is at the Globe an atmosphere of such goodwill, the musicians – usually the first people to step onto the stage – get a round of applause before they’ve even blown a note. If such an atmosphere could be bottled and sold all West End productions would recoup their costs.
The Globe transforms Shakespeare for young people, or at least for my young people. How did we manage without it?
