New
Globe Playhouse

When the American actor Sam Wanamaker visited London after World War II, he looked on Bankside for the splendid memorial to the birthplace of the greatest plays in the English language, and found nothing but this plaque on the wall of a brewery on Park Street in Southwark.

When he came to live in London in the early fifties he started a campaign to recreate the Globe. Over forty years later his dream was fulfilled though sadly he didn't live to see it completed. Shakespeare's Globe now stands on the Bankside of the river Thames close to the site of the original, and every summer since 1997 we have experienced Shakespeare's genius in the setting for which it was intended. Each summer Shakepeare's Globe stages a season of the Bard's plays often with works by other playwrights old and new. I've produced a list of every season with links to the plays performed. I have reviewed most that I've seen and described others that I haven't. When a new season is announced I add to the list with previews.

In 2005 Shakespeare's Globe published a DVD showing a day in the life of the Globe, and a brief history of how it came to be built. Gaynor bought it for my birthday. It starts with a history of how Sam Wanamaker managed to get the Globe built, but goes on to show how the Globe brings in young people on a daily basis to give them an experience of theatre and of Shakespeare. Another major strand in the movie stars Jamie Garnon, who played Mercutio in the 2004 production of Romeo and Juliet. He talks us through an actor's day at the Globe, backstage, in rehearsal, and in performance of that play. This was particularly interesting to me as I saw this production three times, once 'straight' at the Globe, once in an original pronunciation performance, and again in the Great Hall at Hampton Court. As a regular playgoer at the Globe I loved this inside view of the theatre, and after watching the DVD Gaynor too wanted to see a play there.

The reconstructed Globe was built wherever possible using the same methods and materials that were used in the original building. The shell is not circular, but made up of twenty straight sides. Making a circular building from oak tree trunks would be very hard work! Based upon a brick foundation, twenty huge oak timbers thirty two feet high form the skeletal frame of the building. To these are fixed oak frames and timbers with mortice and tenon joints, locked together with over 6000 tapered wooden pegs.

The walls are infilled with oak staves and laths, covered in several layers of plaster. One of the few changes from the ingredients used in the original is the make up of the plaster. The Elizabethan recipe used sand, slaked lime and cow hair. British cattle nowadays have hair too short for this purpose, and goat hair was used instead. Also modern fire regulations required a fire-proof sheet to be sealed in the wall. We don't want a repeat performance of the 1613 disaster, do we?

The charismatic actor Mark Rylance was the Artistic Director of the Globe for nearly ten years, but he said at the start of 2005 that that would be his last season as director. In May 2005 Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company since 1998, was appointed to take over. Dromgoole was then a 40 year old stage director with controversial views on playwrights and current theatrical practice. His 2000 book The Full Room is a series of essays about contemporary playwrights. I guess that it was in that book that he described Sir Tom Stoppard as 'a lunatic' and David Hare as 'a flat writer'. He has been described as 'one of the most controversial rising stars of the theatre'. "'Hold on to your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night' at Shakespeare's Globe!" is what I said when I heard the news, even though I looked forward with eager anticipation to the new era. The Globe productions under his leadership have been very good so far. Fewer experiments such as boys playing women as in Shakespeare's day which were interesting, but somewhat distracting. More new plays which would be good if they were more often successful. Howard Brenton's Anne Boleyn is one rare exception.