Yes: it’s where Shakespeare spent most of his working life, watching his cast and waiting to play his own bit-part roles.

Rivalry is the life-blood of the theatre. Dromgoole quotes the distinguished director Max Stafford Clark saying that every good notice of a rival pierces him like a shard of ice through the heart. In the second half of the 1990s, the Royal Shakespeare Company squandered reputation and public funds under the catastrophic regime of Adrian Noble, while Mark Rylance launched the Globe without a penny of subsidy. He may have had batty views about Bacon writing Shakespeare, but he knew how to please the crowds with a distinctive brand of ‘rough Shakespeare’.

Now Michael Boyd has come to the RSC with an extraordinarily ambitious plan to turn it into something like the Berliner Ensemble (long-term contracts for actors, big political themes for the repertoire). The chirpy Dromgoole, meanwhile, is stepping into Rylance’s shoes as Artistic Director of the Globe. In this book he is often harsh towards the deadness of RSC house style. He has excellent advice for Shakespearean directors and actors: don’t impose a ‘concept’ on productions, don’t faff around with talk of subconscious motivation and the actor going on a ‘journey’ with the character. Just do what Hamlet tells the players: speak the speech clearly and suit the word to the action. Shakespeare will do the rest for you. Will the practice of the Globe live up to the splendid manifesto that this book constitutes? Let the battle of the boards commence.

Jonathan Bate’s books include The Genius of Shakespeare.

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