The abrupt cessation this week of Emma Rice’s tenure as artistic director of the Globe theatre, a post she took up only in April, has been explained by the organisation’s chief executive as relating to her liking for sound and lighting effects – inimical, it is argued, to the founding principles of the theatre, which was designed to stage plays in their original acoustic, light and architectural conditions. The Globe was, a statement from the theatre offers, “reconstructed as a radical experiment to explore the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked, and we believe this should continue to be the central tenet of our work”.
It is a curious moment, oddly explained. While the desire to keep the theatre true to the vision of its founder, Sam Wanamaker, is comprehensible, its trustees must have known what they were getting with Ms Rice: a strong, much-admired artist with a clear authorial signature. Her first season has been widely admired. Looked at another way, this moment marks the latest round in the British theatre wars. There are two battlegrounds, as director Robert Icke has pointed out. First, how to treat classic works, especially Shakespeare. Second, how to regard directors – as handmaidens to the text, or as creative artists. Ms Rice’s allegiances in this war were clear. She had already promised, for example, to work towards gender equality on the stage of the theatre, something that is possible only through strong intervention in the text, since only 16% of Shakespeare’s roles are written for women. Paradoxically, Britain has a problem with Shakespeare.
So tightly bound up is he with British history and cultural identity that the texts themselves are hard to unravel from their performance tradition – from strongly-held memories (or perhaps, more accurately, impressions) of how the plays somehow “ought” to be done. Shakespeare plays range from the clear brilliance of his earlier work to greater, darker Jacobean masterpieces. Doing the plays differently, radically, can offend the sense of appropriateness of some viewers. Doing the plays faithfully, traditionally – whatever that might mean – can strike others as dull, a kind of pandering to a heritage-industry vision of Shakespeare. Sometimes, in all of this, an essential point can get lost: that the most superficially modern vision of Shakespeare can be poor theatre, and that an apparently conservative production can hold great insight.
The presence of kirtles and ruffs does not mean that the production is dusty or tired, nor is a modern setting a guarantor of intelligence. It is hard, though, not to be alive to the fact that some of the most startling and exciting productions of Shakespeare in Britain in recent years – such as those by Thomas Ostermeier of Berlin’s Schaubühne, or Ivo van Hove of Toneelgroep Amsterdam – have come from abroad, from artists free from the weight of Britain’s Shakespearean baggage, free from the reverence that the British can devote to the plays. Regarding his work as holy writ seems particularly perverse in a week when it has been reported that the New Oxford Shakespeare is co-crediting Christopher Marlowe as the co-author of his Henry VI trilogy. If British theatres, and British audiences, want to keep Shakespeare alive and speaking to us now – which he is more than ready to do – they must be bold, and shake off the burden of the past. The texts will remain with us, ready to be read afresh another day.
• This article was amended on 1 November 2016 to credit the idea that there are two battlegrounds in theatre to the director Robert Icke.
