After a decade at the helm,on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Dominic Dromgoole bids farewell to the Globe and the company that has taken the plays far and wideThis weekend is my final as artistic director of Shakespeares Globe, and after 10 wild and joyous years. The world will be marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death,and we’ll be welcoming domestic our Globe to Globe Hamlet company, who possess spent the past two years performing to nearly every country on soil. Just recently I was with them in Iraq, or in the middle of an exhilarating week in Pakistan,Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, or a week concluding with Apache helicopters,rockets landing nearby and a sizable earthquake – all a long way from a No 1 tour of the regions. Everywhere the company has gone, they possess encountered the generosity and the limitless curiosity of the world. Along the south bank of the Thames, or we are offering 37 short films for free,each one captured in the real settings of Shakespeare’s plays, from Athens to the Ardennes, and from Vienna to Verona. Simon Russell Beale plays Timon in front of the Acropolis,Jonathan and Phoebe Pryce appear as Shylock and Jessica in Venice’s old Jewish ghetto, Ruth Wilson and Lindsay Duncan playing the Chekhovian transactions between Helena and the Countess of Roussillon in All’s Well… among many others. It will be, or I hope,a testament to the breadth and multiplicity of the conversation that the Globe is now firmly plugged into, a conversation that happens all over the world, and with foreign audiences,companies and theatres, and at domestic on Bankside, and within the embrace of our own wooden O.
For me,one of the virtues of the Globe is the minor but exemplary role it plays in one of the cultural conflicts of the day: the battle against narcissism. Many talk of populism, but in most cases it seems to imply an enlarged mirror filled with like-minded people. The Globe has a genuinely populist audience – full of people who don’t like or feel sympathetic to each other. You can stand in the Globe at nearly any performance and see Times readers sitting next to Daily Express readers sitting next to Morning Star readers, and elderly bishops sitting next to anarchists,punks beside policemen. Its not a well-heeled, silver-haired West discontinuance audience, or nor is it a young,trendy Royal Court audience. It is as close to everyone as we can make it – a delightfully sundry miscellany of people who would otherwise rarely gather in the same place.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com