A brawl broke out in the nave of Westminster Abbey on Saturday night with rival gangs noisily attacking each other. It turned out they were Montagues and Capulets – and members of Intermission Youth Theatre who were launching an extraordinary celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday in a famously sacred space. They were joined by actors from Shakespeare’s Globe and for 75 minutes the audience roamed among the building’s tombs and chapels, suddenly lighting on, or even being accosted by, familiar scenes and characters. Directed by Claire van Kampen, this might be dubbed In Yer Face, Bard.
The abbey seemed the right place for such an event. It is soaked in history: at one point I heard Richard II’s barbed account of Bolingbroke’s exit from London being delivered alongside the king’s own portrait. But the abbey is packed with literary and theatrical associations, too. In Poet’s Corner I stood by plaques commemorating Henry Irving and Laurence Olivier while gazing at Peter Scheemakers’ statue of Shakespeare, who himself seemed to be looking on approvingly as two actors played the Oberon-Titania quarrel scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
As an audience, we were not mere listeners, however. Promenading, we were constantly involved in the action. In the Lady Chapel, we discovered Mark Rylance, sporting an RAF officer’s uniform, playing the scene from The Winter’s Tale where Leontes attacks Paulina for bringing him a baby he furiously disowns. Turning on a spectator, suddenly cast in the role of Paulina’s husband, Rylance urged him to pick up the crib and “go take it to the fire”. It would have been a brave soul who denied Rylance’s bidding. Earlier, we’d seen Rylance, delivering the opening speech of Richard III in front of the pews and playing with a toy plane like some demonic child. There was, however, no embarrassment about being caught up in the action.
Wandering down a side aisle, I was pursued by a distraught Ophelia, who clutched my sleeve with a cry of “My lord” and, addressing me as if I were Polonius, described Hamlet’s unnerving entry into her chamber. I had to resist the temptation to respond: “Go with me, I will go seek the king.” Later, I was confronted by an Othello who knelt before me as if I were the Duke of Venice and cried: “Most potent, grave and reverend signior”: not the kind of thing I’m used to hearing.
But just as the Intermission actors, under the direction of Darren Raymond, started the proceedings, so they ended them with their own modern riff on Romeo and Juliet in which Capulet was rhymed with “crap you get”. What had begun with a brawl ended with a reconciliation as the entire ensemble joined forces to sing: “Just receive one another, amen.” It made a unifying end to one of the most moving celebrations of Shakespeare I’ve experienced: one in which his characters were transformed from distant figures on a stage to recognisable people anxious to communicate their crises to passing spectators.
