Shakespeare: the playwright who brings the world closer
This weekend is my last as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, after 10 wild and joyous years. The world will be marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and we’ll be welcoming home our Globe to Globe Hamlet company, who have spent the past two years performing to almost every country on earth. Just recently I was with them in Iraq, in the middle of an exhilarating week in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, a week concluding with Apache helicopters, rockets landing nearby and a sizable earthquake – all a long way from a No 1 tour of the regions. Everywhere the company has gone, they have encountered the generosity and the limitless curiosity of the world. Along the south bank of the Thames, we are offering 37 short films for free, each one captured in the real settings of Shakespeare’s plays, from Athens to the Ardennes, from Vienna to Verona. Simon Russell Beale plays Timon in front of the Acropolis, Jonathan and Phoebe Pryce appear as Shylock and Jessica in Venice’s old Jewish ghetto, Ruth Wilson and Lindsay Duncan playing the Chekhovian transactions between Helena and the Countess of Roussillon in All’s Well… among many others. It will be, I hope, a testament to the breadth and multiplicity of the conversation that the Globe is now firmly plugged into, a conversation that happens all over the world, with foreign audiences, companies and theatres, and at home on Bankside, within the embrace of our own wooden O.
For me, one of the virtues of the Globe is the minor but exemplary role it plays in one of the cultural conflicts of the day: the battle against narcissism. Many talk of populism, but in most cases it seems to imply an enlarged mirror filled with like-minded people. The Globe has a genuinely populist audience – full of people who don’t like or feel sympathetic to each other. You can stand in the Globe at almost any performance and see Times readers sitting next to Daily Express readers sitting next to Morning Star readers, elderly bishops sitting next to anarchists, punks beside policemen. It’s not a well-heeled, silver-haired West End audience, nor is it a young, trendy Royal Court audience. It is as close to everyone as we can make it – a delightfully sundry miscellany of people who would otherwise rarely gather in the same place.
Gemma Arterton as Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost at Palacio Real de Olite in Navarre – part of the Globe’s Complete Walk series of short films. Photograph: Emma Draper
The rigid adherence to our £5 ticket price for groundlings has meant that we achieve a broad social mix. Many still like to imbibe their culture within carefully protected class enclaves, and the free and easy way in which the Globe explodes that, now as it did 400 years ago, is one of the principal reasons for its galvanising energy. That still much-touted insult, “oh, it’s a place for tourists”, is all about class. I was lucky enough to attend a first night at the Royal Opera House recently and was surprised to find that there was not a single English speaker in earshot. Everyone was from overseas, but are they dismissed as tourists? No, because they are rich. Shakespeare wrote for everyone, regardless of class or nationality, and would have been delighted to invite anyone into his theatre.
Shakespeare shows us that everyone is important, whether the Messenger or the Queen, and that is the start of democracy
In a world in which we are ostensibly more connected than ever before, in which information should flow more freely and civic discourse should be clamorously diverse, we appear to be retreating further and further into niches. Maybe it’s marketing mania – the impact of the “filter bubble”, where algorithms present us with what they think we want, winnowing down information and opinion we might disagree with, and isolating us in cultural and ideological bubbles from which we have little motivation to escape. But for whatever reason, we are becoming small tribes of narcissists. And wherever it appears – whether it’s religious extremists, Wall Street bankers or liberals clinging to their wine glasses and prejudices in a theatre foyer – narcissism has common themes tactics and dangers. The Globe, which by its nature enforces congregation, and congregation with everyone, is a bracing tonic.
Theatre, and none more wholly than Shakespeare’s, is about nudging us away from ourselves, and into the great levelling whirl of others. As a Kurdish academic said to me in Iraq last week, “From Shakespeare, we learn that everyone is important, whether the Messenger or the Queen, whether the Second Gentleman or Juliet; and that is the beginning of democracy.” As with the audience, so on the stage, Shakespeare peoples his world with a range of opinion, of type, of dimensionality, and all roam freely together.
Simon Russell Beale playing Timon at the Areopagus in Athens. Photograph: Emma Draper
The experience of the plays should detach us from ourselves in the same way as the encounter with fellow spectators. We have tried not to bring the plays closer to us, to assert their modernity or their relevance, to swamp them with the homogeneity that the modern world pushes for, but instead to celebrate their difference. I am fascinated by how the Greeks saw the world, and how they expressed it, by the different realities of Chekhov’s world, and by the overwhelming particularity of Shakespeare’s world. I don’t want them to be brought to me, or made helpfully more familiar, to bolster a neurotically grasped assertion that the present world is the only one of import: I want to be taken to them, I want to discover difference.
As in Shakespeare’s day, the Globe's broad democratic base has encouraged us towards boldness and innovation
My predecessor, Mark Rylance, did this more rigorously, but we have tried to transpose ourselves and our audiences to another point in history. It is one of the ways we discover otherness, and come to understand how people in other times and spaces thought differently, and it counteracts the prevailing desire to sit comfortably in our own bolstered self-image. Former director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor has written brilliantly about how Germany has developed a dynamic relationship with history, how it has used history to subvert and examine and restructure the present – whereas the English tend to shy away from making connections between past and present. The Globe has attempted to revive a certain historical moment, whether well or badly is for the judgment of others, and to use that to challenge and redefine ideas of who we are. We are not just about the Victorians and Empire and the East India Company, though the stains of those influences run deep; we are also still about Elizabeth and James, about unabashedly Merrie England, with all its viscerality, its joy and its love of riot. My successor, the brilliant Emma Rice, will I’m sure do things very differently, and so she should, and in the process discover new truths about what the Globe can do.
Since 1997, the majority of Shakespeare productions at the Globe have been simple, direct and accessible, but what feels obvious to us has often seemed anathema to the rest of British theatre. We have found ourselves occupying a curious position – the radical mainstream. We are happily alone, while everyone else clambers over each other in a bid to be the most revolutionary. It has sometimes felt like sailing down an empty motorway unimpeded, while at every junction the slip roads are clogged with the traffic of theatremakers chasing tangential concepts. We have been continually at war with the conservatism of the avant-garde, and have been repeatedly surprised by the radicalism of our mainstream audience. As they did in Shakespeare’s day, this broad and excited democratic base have encouraged us towards boldness and innovation.
Phoebe Pryce as Jessica and Jonathan Pryce as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at the Globe. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
We have produced 25 new plays, including Nell Gwynn by Jessica Swale and Farinelli and the King by Claire van Kampen, both of which have enjoyed successful West End transfers, two plays which, like our others, have dug into history to scatter light across our present moment. That audience embraced our international work in 2012, when we brought 37 foreign companies to London to perform Shakespeare’s complete works in their own languages, and since then, when we’ve welcomed companies from Belarus, China, Georgia, South Africa and many other places. That audience’s energising enthusiasm, which begins the moment they enter the theatre and encounter the dizzying kaleidoscope of difference within it, has pushed us to take risks.
If there’s one thing the Globe teaches you, it’s about the relationship between Shakespeare and his audience. There’s no hiding from hundreds of expectant faces when you’re playing in daylight, in the open air. You start to understand how much Shakespeare belonged to his audience, and his audience belonged to him. All those prologues and epilogues pleading for collaboration and cooperation and indulgence – of which the “O for a muse of fire” speech from Henry V is perhaps the archetypal example – moments I had once suspected were a bit fey, a bit winsome, flare into emotional clarity. They are genuine pleas, in which Shakespeare lays himself open before his audience and says: “I can’t do this on my own.” Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts, otherwise the whole thing will crumble. You can trace this relationship through the teasing sincerity of Rosalind’s epilogue in As You Like It – “I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you” – to Prospero’s final words in The Tempest: “And my ending is despair / Unless I be relieved by prayer, / Which pierces so that it assaults / Mercy itself and frees all faults / As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.”
Dominic West plays Coriolanus at the Ostia Antica in Rome. Photograph: Emma Draper
That final couplet contains the nugget of an idea Shakespeare often touched on – an idea that helps explain why his audiences at the original Globe and at the Blackfriars were so loyal, and why he continues to pluck at us centuries later. Forgiveness is something that we are all in need of. Prospero looks out at us and acknowledges that we too can be weak, cruel, culpable, whether in act – as Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian have been – or in “things not done but meant”, as Cleon and his wife are in Pericles. Shakespeare recognises the generalised sense of unease and iniquity in the world, and through this recognition offers us a sense of complicity and intimacy and the possibility of absolution. Maybe we are all, in Hamlet’s acerbic words, just “guilty creatures sitting at a play”, but if we can forgive the actors their tricks and illusions, if we can forgive the villains of the piece their misdeeds, maybe we can forgive each other, and ourselves.
How Shakespeare occupies this unique position in the world remains an unfathomable and delightful mystery. The worldwide tour we are about to complete would have been impossible to achieve with any other playwright, or with any other work of art. But the name “Hamlet”, the words “To be or not to be”, with all their gravity-defying simplicity, and the image of a young man looking into a skull in a state of wonderment, are now all part of the cultural language by which we attempt to understand ourselves and each other. The access to extraordinary buildings and spaces we’ve been given in making the Complete Walk films, and the wonderful actors we’ve been able to work with, all happened because of the common agreement that Shakespeare is a passport to something better. And everywhere we have been to film, and everywhere to play with Hamlet, has proved that Shakespeare is the swiftest conduit to understanding the great similarities that pull the world together, but also, more importantly, the fundamental differences. We are not all the same; we should not want to be. Shakespeare and the Globe celebrate the refreshing and embraceable otherness of others.
The Complete Walk: 37 Plays | 37 Films | 37 Screens is on the South Bank, London, 23-24 April.