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Friday 9 January 2009

An eccentric part of the landscape

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

Business is certainly booming. Income is up 12 per cent from last year. Advance sales are over two million, which is vital as the Globe doesn’t get a penny in government subsidy. Nor is the place reliant on corporate sponsors. It’s a straightforward trading theatre. Seven hundred tickets for every performance go for a fiver. If you don’t want to be a standing groundling, a seat will cost you £15 upwards with a pound extra for an optional cushion.

‘The programme here is massively ambitious,’ he says. ‘Five companies in all; we are doing two tours; we have 140 actors and musicians working for us which is on a par with the RSC and the National in terms of scale. We spend huge amounts of money on our education work, which we take very seriously.’

Of course the building itself is the real star. Gorgeous it is, too. I vividly remember the place being hand-built, watching two expert Rastafarian plasterers trowelling lime and goat-hair putty on to the walls. The place is still being worked on. Dromgoole took me up to the gallery above the stage and showed me the new murals in the boxes depicting scenes from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The original Globe was, apparently, a riot of Catholic colour in a world of Puritan whitewash.

‘It is probably the most successful theatre architecture there has ever been,’ he says. ‘The biggest historical problem is why no one attempted to recreate it fully for 330 years.’ Whatever the reason, Globe-mania is now everywhere. Oak forests are being decimated for Globes in Dallas, Massachusetts, Iceland, Rome and Australia, plus a collapsible touring Globe designed by the carpenter who built the London version.

Dromgoole thinks the critics have given the place a rough ride and is known for firing off furious emails of complaint. Pointless, of course. But there’s no doubt he is the right chap to be running the place. He’s full of passion for Shakespeare as a contemporary voice, and his anarchic and funny book Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life pays Shakespeare the compliment of treating him as a very human writer full of flaws. I particularly love the idea that every play contains patches of lousy writing where Shakespeare had clearly started work that morning with a hangover. It’s this similarly irreverent, tradition-free approach to performance that has kept the theatre from becoming a mock-Tudor outpost of Madame Tussauds, however Elizabethan the costumes.

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