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Thursday 4 December 2008

An eccentric part of the landscape

Robert Gore-Langton talks to an irreverent Dominic Dromgoole about the Globe

A few months ago I was at a literary festival on a drama panel which featured a senior actress of the stage. She was holding forth about working with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford when I suggested that Shakespeare’s Globe was just as hugely popular but nobody took it half as seriously. ‘Ah, well, you see there’s a feeling in the industry that it’s all a bit twee — you know, a bit heritage Shakespeare,’ she said.

‘Patronising cow,’ I thought at the time, while laughing along sycophantically. But she probably spoke for most of her generation to whom Stratford is the sacred temple of Shakespearean excellence. A dubious claim these days. But the Globe has over the past ten years undeniably worked its way into the public affection. It was a mad dream which is now a hugely successful reality and an eccentric part of the theatre landscape.

The theatre (if you haven’t yet been, it looks like a wonky thatched Polo mint parked next to Tate Modern) is run by the director Dominic Dromgoole, a likable but combative 44-year-old with a background in new plays. His latest season has just opened with his own no-hanging-about production of King Lear — with David Calder a terrific Lear — to great reviews.

The rest of the year includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with Siobhan Redmond and Tom Mannion), Timon of Athens (a misanthropic satire regarded as box-office suicide) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (with Christopher Benjamin as Falstaff). On top of that there are two new plays: a promisingly disgusting piece, The Frontline by Ché Walker, about modern London on a Saturday night; and Glyn Maxwell’s French historical drama Liberty.

But what about this actor snobbery against the place — how real is it? ‘Thick as cheese,’ says Dromgoole, his arms behind his head in his hi-tech backstage eyrie. ‘It’s a huge factor. Things are fine now but ten years ago the RSC were very insecure about this place and they weighed in heaviest with the Disneyland theme-park accusations and a lot of actors still live within that prejudice. The idea that it’s “heritage theatre” is bollocks. If anything it’s been a shot of adrenalin to the theatre generally and most specifically to Shakespeare-playing. The method that the Globe has revived — plain light, direct address to the audience, getting away from heavy design and directorial concepts — everyone is now doing it. It’s taken theatre back to being all about the actors, the writer and the audience. People find that very refreshing.’

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