CENTRE POINT
The Globe is a monument to infuriating, maniacal, irresistible guts
SIMON JENKINS
The first time I faced what in journal- ism passes for a guilty conscience happened because of the Globe theatre. Back in December 1970, the actor Sam Wanamaker called me out of the blue and asked me to walk with him through the alleyways of Southwark. This zany, talkative American declared his ambition to realise for London what London was incapable of realising itself. He would rebuild Shakespeare's the- atre on its original site. Was it not a great idea?
Er, yes, I replied. The idea was great; pity about the practicalities. The site was beneath the approach road to Southwark Bridge. If the location was not the right one, why bother? The rest of the neigh- bourhood was ghastly, a ghost town of derelict warehouses and office schemes. It was by no stretch of the imagination Lon- don's new theatreland. There were Shake- spearean theatres-in-the-round and apron stages all over the world. Nor did Wana- maker have any money. As for Southwark council, it was• as likely to approve a Bank- side Disneyland as the Tudor Puritans who kicked Shakespeare south of the river in the first place. I wrote an article to this sceptical effect.
Two years later I took another Wana- maker call. 'When journalists are proved wrong,' he said, 'they should print retrac- tions.' He claimed to have found an empty site opposite St Paul's and erected a tem- porary 70-seat theatre. Keith Michell was performing an exhausting full-length Ham- let there. Wanamaker had mortgaged his own house to rent space in the neighbour- hood for a museum, a cinema, a pub and restaurant, a sculpture gallery and a mass of banners and flags. He persuaded the electricity board to floodlight the area at night. He then staged a street party, with lions and elephants from a circus and Annie Ross singing on stage. He drew some 85,000 people to deserted Bankside in two months.
I duly retracted, handsomely I hoped. 'It takes a Yank . . . ' said the headline. Wana- maker had not given up, but had badgered and cajoled and schemed. He still had his dream and had marked out his turf. As the years followed, the lists of his trustees and boards and advisers lengthened and spawned sub-boards and sub-committees. At each meeting Sam would talk inter- minably about his plans. Consultants came and went as fast as the $1,000-a-plate black-tie dinners in New York. There were drawings and more drawings. We were all drawn into Sam's charmed embrace, only to extricate ourselves screaming with com- mittee claustrophobia months or years later. This project would never run.
Today, not five, not ten, but 25 years later, the project is indeed running. It may not be on the site of the Globe. It may be besieged by office blocks. Health, fire and safety may have taken their toll on authen- ticity. But there on the river bank is exactly what Wanamaker intended a quarter of a century ago: a passable facsimile of the bard's 'unworthy scaffold' in timber, mud, plaster and thatch, all in full view of St Paul's. Actors are testing its acoustics. The galleries have echoed to their first 'All the world's a stage'.
Nothing was so sad, indeed so heart- breaking, as that Wanamaker should have died earlier this year with the building unfinished and those lines as yet unheard. But he saw his dream coming true.
Last month as workshops began to test the mocked-up stage, the theatrical com- munity awarded the new Globe its biggest compliment. It picked holes in everything it could find to pick holes in. Some directors said the stage was too big, others that it was too 'restrictive'. Sir Peter Hall dismissed it as 'frightfully wrong' and kicked one of the pillars holding up the canopy. The sight- lines were useless and the pillars too far to the side. There was too much ambient noise, not to mention ambient weather. An adviser from the Museum of London, Mar- tin Clout, criticised everything: since the Rose Theatre excavations, the Globe's size is probably a third too big, the stage is on the wrong side and the canopy too large.
To hell with such quibbles. Authenticity is never complete and with Shakespeare it can be left to pedants. My own scepticism would be on behalf of the audience. What- ever heightened awareness we may get from watching a play in an open-air cockpit is likely to be more than wiped out by the discomfort.
Last week a correspondent to the Times complained that the gallery seats were 'incredibly uncomfortable; my back ached for days afterwards'. As for standing in the pit for hours on end with no interval, why? The point of the Globe is surely to learn new things about Shakespeare's plays, not his audiences. The actors are not expected to change in the open, refuse modern medicine or wash in the Thames, just to be authentic Shakespeareans. I would fill the Globe with armchairs and have done with it.
What is beyond argument is that the the- atre now exists. It does not just commemo- rate Shakespeare or his Globe or, pending the pedants, the validity of his stagecraft. They have their memorial in every corner of the world. What the Globe commemo- rates is one man devoting the last third of his life to defying all the patronising cyni- cism, obstruction and bureaucracy that Britain could throw at him.
Every great project needs its Wanamak- er, its enthusiast. He was the Globe's essen- tial ingredient. He is the beacon that shines across the Thames, a monument to infuri- ating, maniacal, irresistible guts. This is not Shakespeare's Globe. It is Wanamaker's Globe, dedicated not to any bard of Avon but to Bloody-minded of Bankside. That is a monument for our times. And yes, I fear it does 'take a Yank'.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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