The Merchant of Las Vegas

Two or three weeks ago I went over to Stratford to hear Patrick Stewart talk about playing Shylock.  In many respects the discussion was general, partly because he is coming to the role this year for the fifth time, but also because the current production, which had its press night earlier this week, has been shrouded in mystery and the director, Rupert Goold, was very keen that the overall concept of the production shouldn't get out too soon.  As you can imagine that set all of us off trying to find out what we were going to be watching and it wasn't long before someone managed to discover that shock horror the central setting was a casino in Las Vegas.  I'll pause while you all recoil in dismay.

Certainly, all the members of my two Shakespeare classes took several deep breaths before letting me know in no uncertain terms what they thought of the idea.  I have to admit that I wasn't exactly cheering from the gallery myself, although I could see certain similarities between the financial situations explored in the play and the careless way in which money is won and lost in the world of the multimillion Las Vegas gambler.  However, on Monday one of class went to see a preview and the following morning I got an e-mail quite simply raving about it, saying it was the best production of the play she had ever seen and that once she'd got used to the idea she thought the concept was sheer brilliance.

So, it was with a great deal of interest that I went over to Stratford on Wednesday to hear Rupert Goold talk about the play and explain why he'd taken the decision not only to set it in America, but also to play it in American accents.  Of course, there is the argument that East Coast American vowels are closer to those of the Elizabethans than are current English ones and that such a decision makes the speech more authentic, but what was more interesting was what he had to say about the stress patterns involved and how the American speech rhythms emphasise the verse forms far more than the British rhythms do.  I have to admit that I hadn't thought about that before, but once he demonstrated it was easy to see what he was talking about, especially where there is some form of antithesis being evoked.  Try doing 'to be or not to be' in an American accent and you'll see what I mean.  Goold also cited other highly successful productions of the play that have been set in very specific places.  There was one situated in Weimar Germany and another located in the time and location of the early Rothschilds.  In siting the play in the gambling capital of the world he has been able to emphasise the risks that both our own society and that of many of Shakespeare's contemporaries have been prepared to take with money - often, it should be said, with other people's money.

And of course, there is that other great financial parallel - rising inflation and its social consequences.  In medieval England prices had remained pretty much stable for three hundred years, but in the sixteenth century inflation was rampant and by the time this play was written the cost of living had doubled in a matter of years.  Lacking twenty-four hour news programmes to analyse the situation for them, the English were understandably annoyed (actually they would probably have been even more annoyed if they had had twenty-four hour analysis) and their answer was all too often to blame the problem on the foreigners coming into the country, who were, as they saw it, taking their jobs and their wages.  If you think the cry of 'British jobs for British workers' is a twenty-first century slogan, think again.  In the early 1590s the pamphleteers were doing great business raising feelings against Flemish workers in London in just the same way as voices are raised about EU immigration today.  It's easy to see both where the impulse behind the Shylock situation came from and its modern day parallels.

By the time Goold had got this far, and with Val's ringing endorsements in my ear, I was beginning to be won over and the next point he made tipped the scales completely in his favour.  He noted that this is a play that has no character in it that you can actually like and this is the first time that I have come across someone else who has the same problems that I do with Portia.  Now, I know that Portia gets a raw deal from her father.  In this production the whole business with the caskets is turned into a game show.  Choose the right box and get the beautiful girl - and, of course, the money that goes with her!  That's a production choice which seems to me to sum up the whole situation nicely.  However, her bad luck in the matter of fathers can't hide the fact that Portia is as ardent a racist as any of them.  Look at the trial scene closely some time.  She knows Shylock's name and yet she refers to him all the time as 'Jew', you can hear the contempt not simply for the individual, but for his entire race, and it is Portia who, having 'deprived' Shylock of his pound of flesh, suddenly ratchets proceedings up a notch with her 'Tarry Jew, the law hath yet another hold on you'.  She is enjoying this.  There were whispers of discontent in the audience on Wednesday at this point, but I was silently cheering.  I have always avoided directing The Merchant not because of Shylock and the antisemitic issues, but because I have never known what to do with Portia or, perhaps it would be truer to say, because I have never had the courage to play her as I have wanted to and has Goold clearly has taken the risk of doing.

So, all in all this looks set fair to be a very interesting theatrical experience indeed.  Press night was Thursday and the only review I've seen was very positive.  Unfortunately, I'm not seeing it until August, so it will be sometime before I can come back and report here on what I find.  If anyone else is going sooner then I would be fascinated to hear what you think.  

Macbeth ~ Royal Shakespeare Company

The new RSC season has started and all is once again well with my world.  I am never completely happy unless I have a parcel of theatre tickets sitting in my bureau waiting to be used and if they are tickets for the theatres in Stratford well then all the better.  I started off this season's theatregoing last Saturday with a visit to the new Main House to see Macbeth.

Those of you who read my piece last week about Michael Boyd's current production of Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company will recall that I was concerned that this performance might not hold together as a coherent whole, given that Boyd had said he was only playing the Shakespearian elements of the text and cutting out the passages by Thomas Middleton.  Well, I needn't have worried, the production is one of the best I've seen of this play and certainly hangs together as well as Macbeth ever can.  This is in part because, despite what he said, Boyd has still left in certain lines from the Middleton scenes.

Thus, we still have the prophecies that set the whole play in motion.  After all, if no one tells Macbeth that he is destined to be King then we might as well all head for the bar before curtain up and stay there.  But, there are no witches.  Instead Boyd gives us three ghostly children, a direct result of his production some years ago of a dramatised version of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.  Talking about this Boyd said that he had found those children more scary than any representation of the witches that he had ever seen and more appropriate as an image of terror for a modern audience.  And I would have to say that I agree with him, especially as those children then become the MacDuff babes who are later brutally slaughtered.  Believe me, no one was tempted to laugh.

And, we still have some of the Porter's lines, although they are assigned to Seyton and there is no indication of the Porter in the programme.  At first glance it might appear that these lines are kept just as an opportunity to remind the audience that this play was initially performed only months after the failed gunpowder plot and indeed we all came away having had the lesson that you should never return to a firework once lit hammered forcefully home.  However, there is a far more important reason why Boyd has to keep some of the Porter's speech and that is because he needs retain the reference to the equivocator.

There is a really interesting article in the programme by James Shapiro, one of our leading Shakespearian scholars, about the nature of equivocation and the way in which the use of the word changed as a result of the activities of Father Henry Garnet, the foremost Jesuit in England and a man who instructed Catholics how to mislead the authorities not by lying, but by evading the truth.  Garnet was hanged, disembowelled and cut into pieces on May 2nd 1606, the year in which this play was written and so the concept of equivocation would have been very much in the minds of that first audience.  As Shapiro says:

Before this time the word 'equivocation' had only been used by English writers to describe what happened when a word could be understood in more than one way, when its meaning was ambiguous or uncertain.  There was no sense of equivocating as deliberately misleading others in  sinister way or...of using a mixed proposition to express one part of a man's mind, and retain another.


That was not the case after Garnet's activities became well known.

Equivocation is at the heart of this production.  Macbeth tells only part of what has occurred in his letter to Lady Macbeth and they both then equivocate with their guests.  Macduff's wife tells her young son partial truths and Malcolm equivocates with the Thane of Fife himself.  Who is telling the truth? Who dares to tell the truth?  The other aspect of Jacobean England that is forceable brought home, especially through the set, is the fact that the country is still riven by the religious 'civil wars' of the Tudor period.  For the past sixty years it has been unsafe for one faction or another to make known their religious allegiance and who knew who could be trusted and who could not.  Neighbour could turn on neighbour, brother on brother.  The need for equivocation was something Shakespeare's audience would have understood only too well.

As far as it is possible, I thought Jonathan Slinger and Aislin McGuckin handled the main roles well.  I'm not certain that there is ever enough in the early part of the play to account for Macbeth's turn from loyal follower to traitorous renegade.  Those first scenes are appallingly underwritten and my own belief is that we don't have the full Shakespeare text.  I suspect that when the Middleton additions were tacked on it was to bring coherence to a version that had been cut down to fit the 'two hour traffic of our stage'.  Remember that they had to be off stage by five (by-laws were by-laws even in Shakespeare's day) and all the great tragedies would have had to be cut substantially to fit in with this requirement.  Luckily, we have managed to retain the complete Hamlet, Othello and (with certain caveats) Lear, but Macbeth, I think, is another matter.  Slinger came through the early scenes as well as any actor I've seen other than Ian McKellen and McGurkin's descent into madness was well defined.  I also liked the very bluff MacDuff of Aidan Kelly; I would have trusted him with my life any day of the week.

So, all in all, a success, which is more than you can say for most productions of Macbeth.  It's had very good press reviews as well, so if you live within reach of Stratford and feel you might want to see it, I would book quickly.  I think this may be one of those shows where tickets are hard to come by.

Middleton's Macbeth.

I spent an interesting evening on Monday listening to Michael Boyd, the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, talk about his new production of Macbeth.  I haven't yet seen this on stage but what he had to say has certainly whetted my appetite for a play that I wouldn't say is normally one of my favourites.  I have only ever seen it brought off successfully once and then in the very small and intimate space of 'The Other Place'.  For me it's a play that doesn't work in the vast regions of a thousand seater theatre.

Aside: I should ask myself seriously at some point why that is.  After all it was written for The Globe which probably took an audience of three thousand. But that's a discussion for another day.  

To come back to Boyd's production.  What has me particularly intrigued is that apparently he is only playing the Shakespeare text and that is a very bold move indeed.

You do realise, don't you, that Macbeth as we know it (I am trying very hard to avoid the Star Trek joke here, especially with Patrick Stewart in the company this season) is only partially by Shakespeare.  What we have is almost certainly a version for the stage cut and embellished by Thomas Middleton.  If you decide to play only the Shakespearian bits then you lose not only the Porter, but also the Witches and Hecate too.  For some people I know that means the very bits that wake them up.

These passages are, however, parts of the Folio text that can be very hard to bring off.  Antony Sher and Greg Doran in their book Woza Shakespeare make the point that in a society that has no real concept of witches in a way which has an immediate, daily impact, it is almost impossible to invest the characters with the terror that they would have inspired in an audience that believed implicitly in the potency of such figures.  Too often, in the modern British theatre, they simply get the production off to a bad start by being laughed at.  The Porter normally fares better because by that stage in the play you're desperate for anything that offers a bit of light relief.  But, how do you give him the relevance that he had at the time?  His speech is a bit like Koko's 'little list' in The Mikado.  If you want it to have the effect it had when it was first produced, you have to update the references.  Most productions would change the script at this point, although I've never before come across a director bold enough to cut the scene completely.

I have to say that this has me really itching to see this production.  However, I do have a caveat.  Will it hold together now?  I suspect, and of course I have no way of knowing, that we have lost a good deal of what Shakespeare actually wrote when he first put quill to parchment over Macbeth.  Think how short it is compared to the other tragedies.  I've seen an almost uncut version played without an interval in little over two and a half hours.  Try doing that with Othello or Hamlet.  We only have the Folio version of Macbeth.  There are no Quartos published before the 'official' 1623 First Folio.  In other words, we don't have the original Shakespeare Macbeth, only the version 'prepared' by Middleton for a stage that expected a play to be around the two hour mark.  Now, Middleton knew his job.  He has given us a script that works.  He was, after all, a damn good playwright himself.  But if you start to adapt an adaptation are you going to be left with a text that has an inner coherence?

Well, time will tell.  I'm seeing the production within the next couple of weeks and you can be sure I will have something to say about it.  I hope it will be good.

How Much Bottom Space Do You Need?

Ah well, the hay fever season is here again and this is clearly going to be a bad year. So, until my little blue miracle pills begin to kick in, my posts may be a bit on the short side, as too much working with a screen tends to start my eyes watering with a vengeance. I did, however want to share with you the beautiful architectural designs that you can see to your left. These are going to be used as the basis for the Globe Theatre Company's new indoor theatre intended to mirror Blackfriars, the winter home of Shakespeare's Company from 1608 onwards.

The designs were discovered in Worcester College Oxford and probably date from around 1660. I was privileged to be at a seminar last week where Professor Andrew Gurr, the leading scholar in the study of Shakespeare's theatres, company and audiences, presented these to us and talked about what we could learn from them about the theatres of the time. One of the most interesting points he made was that these theatres were clearly designed for listening rather than seeing. As a result, the best seats in the house were those over the stage, on the stage itself, and in the side boxes; exactly the opposite of what you would expect today. In exploring this in greater detail in order to work out what the audience capacity would be, they have come to the interesting conclusion that if you were a Lord you were allowed 2' 6'' bottom space, if you were a Lady you got 2', but if you were like me, a mere pleb, then you had to squeeze yourself into a paltry 18". As someone I was telling yesterday remarked, "Just like travelling by plane then". There are somethings about human nature that simply never change.

Annie

Romeo and Juliet ~ Royal Shakespeare Company

For one reason and another I spent most of last week in Stratford including, on Saturday, going to see the RSC's current production of Romeo and Juliet in the newly rebuilt main theatre. I am not going to go into what I think about the new theatre here, mainly because no one is going to want to read a rant. Surfice it to say that I think they made a mistake trying to put a new stage in the old theatre building. They should have pulled the whole lot down and started afresh. It's too late now to do anything about it, so I'm just going to have to learn to live with it.

The production of Romeo and Juliet, is however, worth revisiting. It started out last year in the Courtyard theatre, the Company's temporary home a hundred yards up the river bank and I very much enjoyed it then. During the intervening year it's consolidated its better points and dealt with some of the problems and is now a very polished theatrical experience indeed.

I always feel with this play that there are no half measures. You are either going to like the way the director decides to approach the production or you are going to hate it. I have seen more performances of Romeo and Juliet that have left me seething than any other play in the canon. In fact it is the only play I've ever walked out of and I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to stand up about twenty minutes in and say to the uncomfortable looking cast something along the lines of "Okay, you've got this wrong, haven't you? Shall we go back to the beginning and try again?"

But when a company get it right it can be so good and Rupert Goold has brought this production together very successfully, although I'm not sure it is for quite the reasons he intended. There are a couple of very erudite essays in the programme, one about the Counter Reformation and the other an exploration of suicide in the arts, but although they are both extremely interesting they don't signal what is, for me, most obviously successful about the interpretation. The production works for me because they have managed to find a way of exploring a universal aspect of human nature in a way that keeps it firmly rooted in Shakespeare's time and yet also ties it to our own. For what is the quarrel between the Montagues and the Capulets but a sixteenth century manifestation of gang culture and even more specifically, knife crime?

For the most part the play is presented in Elizabethan Verona, but it begins with a streetwise twenty-first century youth, complete with hoodie, listening to a recorded tourist guide. This is Romeo and the costume choice works as we slide into the sixteenth century setting partly because of the colour and the materials chosen and partly because of the Universal nature of the teenage uniform of tee-shirt and jeans. When Juliet appears in something very similar, she works in both time periods as well. And that is all it takes to bring home to you the disturbing fact that one tribe of teenagers, turned against another tribe by elders who ought to know better, are exactly the same now as they have ever been. Whether it is on the streets of Renaissance Verona, or amongst the tower blocks of modern day London, the murder and mayhem that is unleashed is terrible to behold.

A second feature of the production which helps to hammer home this disturbing fact is the attention that has been paid to ensuring that the lovers come over as very young teenagers. I don't know exactly how old Mariah Gale and Sam Troughton are, but I would have thought early thirties and yet they both manage to communicate that frantic, explosive switch from one extreme of emotion to the other, that is  the hallmark of teenagers everywhere. Gale in particular does the sulky thirteen year old so well there are times when you want to slap her. And the fact that you know wouldn't be the sensible way to handle the situation is neither here nor there. Like all the 'best' teenagers, she just gets to you.

The production closes in Stratford very soon and I'm not certain if they are taking it anywhere else, but if you do get the chance to see it then it's worth looking out for. The new season gets underway next month with Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice. I know they have to fill the theatre, but it would be nice to break away from the obligatory exam texts once in a while. I wonder when someone is next going to be brave enough to give a season of Timon of Athens?

PS. Sam Troughton is a very good actor, but I find it hard to forgive him for making me feel very old indeed. I remember watching not only his father, but also his grandfather. Damn him!

Annie

Everyman ~ The Original

This month our Monday book group is reading Philip Roth's 2006 novel, Everyman, and as it must be all of thirty-five years since I read the original morality play, I thought I ought to go back and revisit it if I was going to be able to make sensible comparisons between what I assume are texts that are meant to be considered together.

The earliest print fragment of Everyman dates to somewhere between 1510 and 1525 and although it has been suggested that it is actually several decades older than that if, as is often posited, the English play is based on the Antwerp text of Elckerlijc (c 1518-1525) then this fragment is probably very close to the time of composition. This isn't the place to go into theatre history and its developments, but if Everyman is as late as 1525 then the changes that were to take place in the intervening seventy-four years between this and the opening of The Globe on Bankside in 1599 with that ringing cry of Oh for a muse of fire are just unbelievable. Even the thought makes my head spin. (Look, we can argue another day about whether the choruses were in that first performance - stop trying to distract me and take me off subject!)

What strikes me most immediately about Everyman is how modern it is and yet how much it is of its own time. There can't be a single person who reads this who doesn't identify with the main character, facing his own death and realising that the life he has lived has not been as he might have wished. It doesn't matter whether you define a well-lived life in terms of religious belief or not, surely everyone of us has to have some regrets. And everyone of us has to share Everyman's fear as well. I know that there are some people who live in such pain, physical or mental, that death is a relief, but even in such instances there must be, I would have thought, a certain amount of trepidation. And, the 'associates' who desert Everyman, his friends, his kin and most especially his goods - well I bet there are a few people around now who are reckoning the cost of the financial turn around in more than just monetary terms.

But, at the same time, this is so much part of the medieval society, especially in its insistence that however much Everyman repents he has to get it all sanctioned by a priest. No question of finding your own way to salvation, you go the way the church lays down or you don't go at all. If this is as late as 1525, then Martin Luther has been making waves on the Continent and the Catholic Church in England, not aware of the home grown challenge just around the corner, would be keen to emphasise and reinforce its power over the people who would have made up the audience for this drama.

Something that I do find interesting is that unlike a lot of other plays of this type there is no depiction of the 'fun' that Everyman has had up to the point that death comes along and says "Oy". We just jump straight in there on the fateful day itself. Maybe the church wasn't taking any chances. Don't give the plebs any ideas, they can be creative enough in the ways of evil as it is without putting notions in their heads for them. It does make for a pretty dark play from the first line onwards.

But, the original version of Everyman has one speech in it that surely lifts the heart of every reader who meets it. Having been forsaken by those he thought would always stand by his side, Everyman thinks he is alone until he discovers his ailing Good Deeds and that virtue's sister, Knowledge and it is Knowledge who says to him

Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide,
In thy most need, to go by thy side.

This, of course, is the preface to the books published in the Everyman series. Words that still thrill me every time I hear them.

So, how is this going to relate to Philip Roth's book? That remains to be seen. Not only, of course, a modern retelling, but also one by a notably non-Christian writer. Our discussion this week is going to be very interesting.


Annie

Recalling Shakespeare

On Monday I went to see a dear friend who is in the process of moving house.  It's a difficult situation because she has lived in the same rather isolated cottage for the past sixty-three years and she is a hoarder.  As you might imagine, given the length of time she's been in her home, she is having to move because of health problems and she is going into much smaller accommodation.  It isn't easy for her, either emotionally or physically.  

I went over on Monday specifically because she wanted me to  have her collection of programmes from the theatre visits she'd made to Stratford over the years to use with the Shakespeare groups I teach.  While I'd seen many of the same productions myself, I don't have the space to be a hoarder and so I haven't kept any but the more recent programmes myself.  I've often regretted this, but a small house is a small house and that's all there is to it.

As you might imagine, I've had the most wonderful time over the past few days going through these programmes and recalling some of the marvellous productions I've had the privilege of seeing since I first started going to Stratford in the early 1960s. They include, for example, the programme for the very first professional Shakespeare I saw, Peter Hall's 1962 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Judi Dench as Titania, Diana Rigg as Helena and, I notice, the novelist, Margaret Drabble, tucked away among the fairies.  I knew she had wanted to be an actress, but I hadn't realised I'd been there to see her early attempts.

It is, though, the even earlier programmes that really make you catch your breath and turn green with envy. Here, for example, is the 1959 production of Othello with Sam Wanamaker as Iago and Paul Robeson as The Moor.  What wouldn't I have given to see that.  Or the Cymbeline from two years earlier with Peggy Ashcroft as Imogen and, hidden deep among the Lords, Ladies, Servants and Guards, an as yet unheard of, Eileen Atkins.  And what about a production of Dr Faustus just after the war, in 1947, with Robert Harris as the eponymous scholar and Paul Scofield as the evil Mephistophilis? 

The piece de resistance, however, has to be the 1951 programme for Henry IV Pt I.  The cast list reads like a theatrical who's who of the period; Harry Andrews as King Henry, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Michael Redgrave as Hotspur, Hugh Griffiths as Owen Glendower and, of course, Richard Burton as Prince Hal.  I am not old enough to remember Burton as anything other than a film actor.  How I wish I could have seen that production.  The Henry IVs are among my favourite plays anyway, but with a cast like that.......

I'm so sorry for my friend that she has had to give away programmes that are reminders of so many happy memories, but I know she is pleased that they are going to be put to good use and when I talk to her about the memories they have recalled for me as well, we are at least going to have food for hours and hours of theatrical discussion.

Love is my Sin

I've just come in from Stratford, where I've been to The Swan to see Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington in Love is my Sin, a piece devised and directed by Parry's husband, Peter Brook, and based on a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets.

I'll write at some later point, perhaps, about what I think of the newly refurbished RSC theatre, especially as I haven't yet been into the reconstructed Main House. As far as I can see pretty much all they've done in The Swan is reupholster the seats. And thank goodness they haven't messed it about in anyway because as a space for live theatre it was pretty much perfect as it was.

Shakespeare's plays haven't yet made a reappearance in either the Main House or The Swan. Wisely, the management have chosen to stage a number of smaller events to get the theatres up and running and thereby give themselves a chance to iron out any teething problems. And, when they do introduce full length plays they will be productions moved over from last season's repertoire in The Courtyard rather than anything new.

So, what I've been to see today was a travelling show that took thirty-one of Shakespeare's sonnets and used them to create the story of a love affair between two people no longer in the prime of youth but still more than capable of all the intensity of feeling that goes with loving someone and for one reason or another being uncertain of the reciprocity of the emotion. I have to say that it was one of the most beautiful and touching pieces of theatre I've ever experienced.

The sonnets were split into four groups: Devouring Time, Separation, Jealousy and Time Defied. Brook says of his selection:

At first, Shakespeare evokes a shared tranquility, but little by little the pains of love appear: there is separation, then infidelity and treachery which lead to a disgust of the body and flesh. But in a final phase, Shakespeare affirms the reality of a love that can transcend all barriers that is even more powerful than age or death.


For love can conquer time.

For the most part, the sonnets selected were not the better known ones, but they led up to probably the most famous of them all, number 116,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Parry and Pennington are both brilliant actors, but even so I think the two facts that hit me most forcibly would have been apparent had that not been the case. The first was something that should perhaps have been obvious, namely that these texts were composed by a man who wrote for the voice and who wrote to tell a story. At no point did it appear that we were listening to poetry. These could all have been speeches being made one character to another in any of Shakespeare's plays.

The second feature that was brought home to me, even though, again, it was something I shouldn't have needed reinforcing, was how close iambic pentameter is to natural English speech patterns. If you hadn't been aware that on the page these words were laid out as fourteen lines of ten syllables each you would never have guessed. And this just makes the works all the more miraculous, because it infuses them with a truth that transcends the structure and takes on a life of its own.

One other factor that was interesting in respect of my Titus Andronicus studies was the use the Brook made of music. I've spent the last couple of days researching his 1955 production of the play and apparently one of the things that made it so effective was his use of sound, often very minimal, often discordant and unexpected. He did exactly the same here, including at one point having the single musician use the bellows of a piano accordion to echo the sighs of lost love. It always seems miraculous to me when you can feel events reaching to each other across boundaries of space or time or culture and this was one such occasion.

Annie

Corral de Comedias

This morning I finished reading Woza Shakespeare, the account of the South African Titus Andronicus and reached the section where Doran and Sher describe the time the company spent in Almagro in Spain. Here they are taken to see the Corral de Comedias, a courtyard theatre with timbered galleries in which productions were being staged at the same time as Shakespeare and The King's Men were Performed at The Globe. This isn't a reconstruction like our own Bankside Globe, this is the real thing.

As you can see, in design it is rather more like the indoor theatres, such as Blackfriars where Shakespeare and his company moved for winter seasons after 1608, than the polygonal Globe, but like The Globe it is open to the elements, so perhaps the more apposite comparison would be to the inn yards that preceded the purpose built theatres of the 1570s and later. And its preservation is simply stunning. Of course, given the Act of Parliament in 1648 which not only banned public performance but also made it illegal to watch plays it's not surprising that none of the London playhouses survived. Nevertheless, I can't imagine that we would have gone out of our way to preserve a theatre building as this has been; the theatre has just never been seen as that important.

There is another tantalising link to be drawn here. Almagro is in La Mancha, the home of Don Quixote. I always have to shake myself to remember that Cervantes and Shakespeare lived and wrote at the same time and that Shakespeare knew the Spaniard's great story. Robert Shelton's translation of the first part hit the St Pauls' bookstall in May 1612 and at the end of that year Shakespeare and the new young playwright, John Fletcher, presented their joint venture, Cardenio, based on one of the episodes in Cervantes book, in two performances at court. Apart from a 1727 version very much bowdlerised by Lewis Theobald, called Double Falsehood, we have no record of the play. However, there have been a couple of attempts in the past two or three years to reconstruct the original and this Spring, Greg Doran, the director of the South African Titus, is going to have another go at staging Cardenio in The Swan Theatre at Stratford.

Only time will tell how successful this will be. We have had a number of speakers at the Shakespeare Institute and at the Birthplace who have all drawn attention to just how difficult it is to decide which lines in Double Falsehood belong to Shakespeare, which to Fletcher and which to Theobald. There is also the question of the missing sub-plot. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the extant plays from that period have a sub-plot of one sort or another but Double Falsehood does not. It rather looks as though Theobald didn't so much adapt Cardenio as fillet it. I'd like to think, though, that Doran's attempt might be successful and then perhaps the production could be taken to Almagro and staged at the Corral de Comedias, returning its characters at least to their spiritual home.




Annie