Alas, poor Emma. The untimely exit, stage left, of the Globe’s contentious artistic director, Emma Rice, pursued by her metropolitan critics, deprives the South Bank in London of a theatrical imagination full of risk and originality. It also plunges a much-loved institution, still not 20 years old, into a self-inflicted crisis. No surprise there: showbiz has always teetered on the brink of catastrophe.
This is not the first time the Globe has been in trouble. In 1601, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and their resident playwright, took to the road in some despair. London’s theatre trade had been made intolerable by the vogue for troupes of child actors, who were being “tyrannically clapped” by the groundlings. More recently, both Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole have endured their share of brickbats. And here’s the rub. Even in the 21st century, visitors to Shakespeare’s Globe are entitled to expect a measure of authenticity. Some reviewers sneer at “heritage theatre”, just as some music lovers scorn period instruments. But the Globe should offer the real thing. “This is what it was really like in Shakespeare’s time” is a commercial proposition. The Globe, impressively, takes almost no public money for its dedication to theatrical verisimilitude.
The white wand of authenticity does not guarantee magic. The too-faithful reproduction of blank verse drama in fake Elizabethan accents can be deadly. Presumably, this was the raison d’etre for appointing Emma Rice, the radical founder of Cornwall’s Kneehigh theatre, in the first place.
She was incredibly ill-advised to speak slightingly of the Bard. “I have tried to sit down with Shakespeare but it doesn’t work. I get very sleepy and then suddenly I want to listen to The Archers” was a mistake, but she is in many ways wonderfully Shakespearean. Her Midsummer Night’s Dream was transgressive and a bit mad, but hugely popular with the all-important younger audiences in a way Shakespeare would have understood.
One of the ironies of this affair is that a playwright who delighted in picking and stealing material from any available source, and cheerfully remaking it to suit his purposes, has been turned by the Globe’s board into a plaster saint recoiling in horror from “neon lighting”.
Good directors do not grow on trees and Rice was a bold and imaginative appointment. Next time, the Globe’s board should instruct their search team to ask candidates about their attitude to the greatest playwright who ever lived, a national treasure who is still happily Brexit-free. The show must go on.
