This week on the By Jove blog, something we’ve not had in a while: a good, old-fashioned RANT, courtesy of our co-artistic director, David Bullen…
This week Shakespeare’s Globe announced that their artistic director, Emma Rice, is to step down in 2018 after producing a mere two seasons at the theatre. The reasoning behind this departure is apparently quite simple. Rice’s vision involves bringing in modern lighting and sound equipment, and the Globe’s board feel that this goes against the purpose of the theatre. In the press release announcing Rice’s exit, the Globe’s CEO Neil Constable describes this purpose as a “radical experiment” that explores “the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked”.
The problem with this – as many and more have already wittily pointed out – is that despite the Globe’s best efforts to faithfully replicate the architecture of Shakespeare’s era, the building is pretty much the only “condition” remotely akin to the early modern period. The board don’t seem to have realised that their previous two artistic directors have been running a working theatre for the last twenty years, one that is decidedly unlike Shakespeare’s company in the majority of its practices. Of course, some modernisation is understandable, given that the majority of those early modern “conditions” are irretrievably lost. Shakespeare’s plays were cutting edge when first performed – now there are over four centuries of cultural shift to negotiate when putting on those texts. Performing them in a space that resembles an Elizabethan playhouse does not magically transform the audience into Elizabethans.
Emma Rice at Shakespeare’s Globe
So what has Emma Rice done to cause the board, and those supporting them, to reassert their desire for this impossible experiment in reconstruction? The Globe’s board cite lighting and sound equipment as their primary point of contention, the implication being that it changes the space too much. If this is the case, it betrays some stunning hypocrisy on the board’s behalf. But then again, perhaps they never noticed the fact that Rice’s predecessor, Dominic Dromgoole, only directed two productions in his entire tenure that didn’t completely reconfigure the stage. Perhaps, indeed, they have never noticed, throughout the entirety of the modern Globe’s existence, the starkly non-Shakespearean practice of casting women in women’s roles, of frequently wearing historically inaccurate clothing, and of modifying the stage with ramps and thrusts and scaffolding for both Shakespeare plays and other texts alike. Detractors of Rice in the media have made much of the fact that she said that reading Shakespeare can make her “snoozy” and she wasn’t aware that 2016 was the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death – clear indicators, apparently, that she is no worthy custodian of the hallowed Bard. Those same detractors conveniently seem to have forgotten the fact that Dromgoole and his own predecessor, Mark Rylance, have gone on record to describe the Globe space as “wrong” – and that Rylance doesn’t even believe Shakespeare wrote his own plays. In both her practice and her irreverent views on the playwright, then, Rice is not too dissimilar to the men who went before her.
What Rice has done is make unequivocal steps towards achieving of a vision of “Shakespeare for everyone”. She hasn’t merely gestured towards this with token casting and new writing pieces. She has taken Shakespeare and dismantled the middle-class, white, male, heterosexual focus that pervades much of his work, and that – more crucially – characterises the playwright’s modern reception history. From the Victorian era onwards, Shakespeare has been constructed as the pinnacle of culture, used throughout the British Empire to assert the superiority of white, Western values. Yet Shakespeare’s plays, being of their time, are frequently inflected with glaring misogyny and racism, homophobia and transphobia. I should hasten to add that I am not attacking these plays’ credentials as impressive works of arts; rather I am suggesting that as they stand they are, for the most part, focused on the stories of white, privileged, heterosexual men. The way the plays have been enshrined into Western culture in the last few centuries has further cemented their exclusivity, making them the definition of literature for the privileged. Many school teachers, theatre-makers, and lovers of literature everywhere have fought tirelessly to prove that this doesn’t have to be the case. This year Rice took up the challenge and – disastrously for her – succeeded.
Rice’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened her inaugural season. Most people who have worked in British theatre will have seen at least one production of the Dream, and sometimes many more – it is, after all, the most performed play in the world. And why not? It’s a great play: it’s about love in its many permutations, and is full of gags and magic and mischief. Yet I can’t be alone in having sat through many a dreary production that failed to convey the text’s wonder to its audience. Rice’s Dream made it shine through like never before, in the single most hilarious and moving production of the play I have ever seen. Part of what made the production so effective was that the Globe’s space was at its heart. Rice and dramaturg Tanika Gupta made some slight but slick tweaks to the text in order to set it at the Globe itself, with the lovers cast as Hoxton hipsters and the mechanicals as the theatre’s cleaners, administrators, and volunteer ushers. The fairies – dressed in colourful, messy reinventions of early modern costume – became embodiments of the wonder, history and theatricality of Shakespeare’s Globe; the strange, transformative power of experiencing the full potential of this master playwright’s words realised with the vivacity made possible by such a space.
A bigger change to the original was gender swapping the lover Helena in order to make her Helenus. This introduced a same-sex dynamic into the play that made it resoundingly relevant to twenty-first century Britain. It enabled me, as a gay man, to appreciate the play’s poignant message about the realisation of hidden desires and the triumph of true love in a way I had never quite experienced before. Indeed, Rice’s production let in many of the people Shakespeare’s modern reception has shut out. Not only did the creation of Helenus open it up from the perspective of sexuality, but more than half the cast were women, and many of the significant, leading parts – including Oberon and three of the lovers – were played by black or Asian actors. Rice achieved this without excluding the white, heterosexual middle classes: two of the funniest performances were from a decidedly white, middle-class, heterosexual man and woman, mechanicals Bottom and Quince respectively. The production came across as a heartfelt endorsement of love across the spectrum of human experience. But perhaps more importantly it felt like a much-needed celebration of a progressive, multi-cultural Britain – with Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Globe firmly positioned as pillars of such cultural inclusivity.
Ncuti Gatwa and Ankur Bahl as Demetrius and Helenus in Emma Rice’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
If Rice’s Dream was her vision in comic mode, then her commissioning of Imogen – Cymbeline “renamed and reclaimed” – was a grittier expression of the sentiment. Also set in modern Britain and starring an actor made famous by Eastenders, it reworked one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays to make it unflinchingly about the concerns of many young people living in Britain’s urban centres today. Like the Dream, it was a massive hit with audiences. For already spurned “purists”, however, it was a step too far. In what can only be described as a stunning display of privilege, The Times’ Richard Morrison declared himself baffled as to exactly “from what and for what” Cymbeline was being reclaimed. Progressives everywhere subsequently cried out: FROM YOU, RICHARD, AND FOR EVERYONE ELSE.
Morrison’s remark is indicative of how blinded those behind the Globe board’s decision are: they have no idea how their own zealous ring-fencing of Shakespeare under the guise of their “radical experiment” disbars so many from the playwright’s work and all the cultural capital that comes with it. Rice and Imogen’s director, Matthew Dunster, dared to actualise the idea that “Shakespeare is for everyone”, committing to it with the full force of their impressive artistic talents. The board and those supporting them perceived this as an assault on cultural artefacts they very clearly considered their own. In forcing Rice out, the message they’ve sent is clear: Shakespeare isn’t for everyone, after all. If you don’t immediately perceive the universal wisdom in these stories about privileged white guys and their problems, then you’re stupid and shouldn’t be going to the Globe at all – go home and watch Ten Things I Hate About You instead.
