The architecture of theaters is a curious thing, because it often contains subtle messages about what it considers the relationship between the audience and the plays. And I don’t mean the shape of the stage and the arrangement of seats, important as those are. The message begins out in the lobby, or even on the façade. Some theaters pitch themselves as small and hip, theater for people who just like going to shows. Some (especially the ones that do musicals) pitch themselves as glittering and glamorous general-purpose entertainment, some as high cultural meccas.
The Globe Theatre seems designed as the goal of student field trips. In addition to the reproduction Shakespearean-era theater, there is a modern support building in which tickets are sold. The lobby area is tiled, floor and wall, in ugly brown-red tiles, like a school cafeteria. There is a little diorama of the theater building one is about to enter. There is a gift shop containing mildly educational souvenirs but not necessarily, say, the actual text of the plays performed. The whole set-up so valorizes the reproduction that I imagine many visitors consider the plays an accessory to the building, like the waxwork dioramas installed in stately homes.
Even the food is like food at a museum, which is not a compliment.
At the play I attended — disorientingly, a production of Euripides’ Helen in a new translation by Frank McGuinness — the standing-room Yard was full of young adolescents who plainly had been dragged along by their parents. The adolescents held instructive muttered conversations during the action. They shuffled. They snickered openly at the dramatic reunion of Helen and her husband Menelaus: not because it was badly performed, but (I suspect) because it is a rather stylized scene and because these kids were just too young to have any notion of the human experience underlying it.
I’m not against the reproduction of older styles of theater as a route to understanding the performance realities of the plays performed there, but I’m a bit against the reliquarist’s mindset that makes the reproduction Globe an object of thoughtless pilgrimage. The lasting monument of Shakespeare is not this building that sticks out foolishly on the Embankment and looks like a supersized Renaissance Faire prop. It is the living drama, which can be performed under all sorts of circumstances, provided the audience comes there to be an audience.
The same is of course true of Euripides, and fortunately the people behind the production of Helen knew this, even if some of the young people present did not. The translation was sprightly and felt accessible without being self-consciously Modern and without discarding much of the original content; the actors played with considerable heart, especially Paul McGann as Menelaus; the blend of laughter and pain, and the sense of human dignity in the face of a senselessly unfair divine order, were true to their origins; and when at the end the play dissolved into dance I felt I at last understood this curious and stylized way of finishing a story.
So it’s not a bad company, and the theater’s not a bad theater, and there is something to be said for looking back to older performance techniques. But if you go, don’t go to be a spectator or a museum-goer. Go to be a member of the audience, which is more dangerous. Go to hear what the playwrights and the actors have to say to you.
