ARTS “The whole place was set up on the premise that the theatre would be a disaster.” Dominic Dromgoole is close to talking himself out of a job. According to its artistic director, Shakespeare’s Globe – which was completed in 1997, the brainchild of American actor and director Sam Wanamaker – was never really meant to be anything like the success it has been. “The intention was to recreate an authentic Elizabethan playhouse and by incredibly detailed and scrupulous work they managed to do that. Then they opened the doors and they literally thought no one would come. So you’ve got the exhibition downstairs, the bar, the restaurant, the balcony room, an event space, the shop ... all of that, in Sam Wanamaker’s imagination and in the first economic models they did, was the engine that would subsidise this theatre that no one, but no one, would want to come and see. They didn’t think anyone would want to stand in the yard or sit on those horrible benches. They thought it was ridiculous. Then the doors opened and, suddenly, people flooded in, and they adored it.”
In fact, the Globe is so successful that, alone among British theatres of its size, it receives no government funding. Consequently, when I ask Dromgoole the day after the result of the London mayoral election how he will be working with the new fellow a few hundred yards downstream at City Hall, he responds: “Oh, God, I hope there’ll be as little contact as possible. Once every year we do a big Shakespeare’s birthday celebration and they’ve been contributing funds to that for the last four or five years to a very minor extent. That’s been nice but it’s one of the most liberating things about this place, being outside the subsidised theatre network, that you don’t have to get drawn into that sort of culture.”
It’s not just in a British arts context that the Globe’s financial footing is extraordinary. “If you talk to a North American theatre owner, they’re as surprised by us as an English theatre company is,” says Dromgoole. “Any North American theatre will by and large survive on 40, 50, 60 per cent of its money coming from sponsorship and patronage, subscription schemes, corporate donors, whatever. Their trading will only be about 40 per cent of their operation. Here trading is about 80 per cent of our operation, which is remarkable.” What with two separate tours as well as the Bankside operations, “this summer we’ll have five companies doing eight shows, at one point we’ll have about 120 actors and musicians on our book. The only places that compare to that are the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and they get about 20m quid each and we get zero, so it’s very odd and peculiar and an extraordinary achievement.”
Dromgoole seemed an odd choice for the Globe post: someone whose directing career had been almost entirely in the field of new writing, at the helm of the Bush Theatre in the early 1990s and then as Peter Hall’s new-writing lieutenant at the Old Vic, taking on a venue that was all about not just old writing but to an extent old theatrical practices as well. But he sees a continuity in it. “There’s a through line between the Bush and here, in that what this place is about is treating Shakespeare’s plays as if they were written the day before and just slapped down in front of us, and you pick it up and go, ‘My God, King Lear, that’s rather good; let’s put it on!’ What Michael Boyd does with the RSC is a reaction to 400 years of performance history, to other great productions, what other directors and European theatre and world theatre are doing. But we’re not doing any of that. We’re saying, ‘These plays are remarkable; let’s slap them on and do them with the enthusiasm and honesty and joy that they deserve.’
“And that feeds through to education.” The Globe’s education programme, under director Patrick Spottiswoode, gives workshops to 800 students a day as well as sessions in schools, performances for students and various international and other programmes. Dromgoole says: “The idea of education is that the workshops are exciting, theatrical, performance-based, an event. You come in to have something happen to you, not to be taught something or to be dictated a moral message or given a bit of wisdom; you come in for a thrill. The plays here aren’t a ‘reading’ of the play in a quiet, scrupulous way to sit and nod at, ‘Oh, this is interesting’ ... this place isn’t about that.”
In fact, he argues with a touch of the contrarian and crusader about him, the Globe has fundamentally realigned critical and scholarly perspectives on Shakespeare. “If you pick up any new edition of a Shakespeare play, an Arden, an Oxford, a Penguin, whatever, and read it ... Thirty years ago a lot of the introduction would be about the play as a piece of political thinking, a philosophical statement, a poem, a collection of images and so on. If you pick up an edition since this place has opened, the massive emphasis is on the play as performance: how it’s been performed, what it’s like in performance, what the history of its performance is. So that’s really changed how people think about Shakespeare, in much the same way as Patrick has in his education programme. People look at it as something that’s done, and is exciting and an event.
“And that’s a real, radical change that has been afforded by this place. And in a bigger sense, the Globe has really changed how people understand what theatre can be. Even though no one will admit it, because they all want the Globe to be unpopular and not taken seriously, they’ve taken an enormous amount of it on. People now see that you can make a Shakespeare play happen without big, hefty, cumbersome sets and without enormous amounts of directorial interference, that it can be plain and fresh and simple.”
