Margaret Casely-Hayford appointed as Chair of Shakespeare’s Globe
We are delighted to announce that Margaret Casely-Hayford has been appointed as the new Chair of the
Board of Trustees at Shakespeare’s Globe. She takes over from Lord Bichard, who
has served three years as Chair and ten years as a Trustee.
Margaret Casely-Hayford says: ‘I’ve always disliked seeing the arts weaponised and used as a tool to
carve out and perpetuate the distance between the privileged and everyone else.
So, it is an honour and a joy to be at the helm of an organisation that strives
to make sure that its rich cultural heritage is accessible and available to
all.’
Neil Constable, Chief Executive of Shakespeare’s Globe, says:
‘I am thrilled to be welcoming Margaret
as our new Chair of the Board. With a wealth of experience in senior roles
across the private and public sectors, she has an excellent understanding of
the needs of a complex organisation with international profile and reach. Her
mixture of legal, business and charitable expertise will be enormously valuable
to us. After thirteen years of service, including three as our Chair, I’d like
to thank Lord Bichard for his dedication to the Globe.’
Margaret has a breadth of experience spanning the
commercial, charitable and public sectors. She is currently Chair of ActionAid
UK, appointed in 2014. The charity is dedicated to relief of poverty and to
education, with a specific focus on the establishment and promotion of the
rights of women and girls. Previously she was a Government appointed
non-executive director of NHS England (2010 – 2014). Other Government
appointments include being a Special Trustee for eight years of Great Ormond
Street Hospital Charity and Trustee of the Geffrye Museum. She is also
nonexecutive director of the Co-op Group.
Margaret is involved with a number of education
organisations, including being Chair of the advisory board of start-up Ultra
Education, which teaches entrepreneurial skills to children from primary school
upwards. She is a Patron of the Sir John Staples Society and supports London Music
Masters, which both seek to encourage cultural and music education in state
schools. Most recently in May 2017, she was appointed as Chancellor of Coventry
University.
Previously, Margaret worked for nine years as Director of
Legal Services and Company Secretary for the John Lewis Partnership plc, where
she also operated as senior legal and compliance advisor to the Executive
Chairman and Senior Management of the Partnership group. Prior to that, she
worked for twenty years as a solicitor and was a partner at the global law
firm, Dentons.
Southwark Youth Theatre Blog: A Belated Happy Holidays
The beginning of February is not perhaps the most conventional time to wish you a happy holiday, but I hope you will accept this belated piece of festive cheer on behalf of the Southwark Youth Theatre as we reconvene after our Christmas break.
We ended our last term on a high, with a very successful winter sharing performance in which the youth companyshowcased all of the skills they have gained over the last few months.
In our first term, we focussed on the art of improvisation; a kind of acting based on the performers’ ability to say ‘yes’ to anything offered to them on stage – no matter how nerve-wracking or how ridiculous. To acquire this skill is no mean feat, but the company tackled it with gusto.
We began the process with games like ‘MARTHA’, where the company are given a description of a scene to make a freeze frame image of, with every member striking a pose and describing what they are in the scene (which can be anything from ‘I am the king’ to ‘I am the air of grandeur’).
After they had mastered this, the company built up to creating their own devised scenes for the sharing performance. The younger group’s scenes were based around themes from King Lear (using puppets and drums aplenty), while the older group’s were centred around different objects symbolising the themes (which brought us, amongst other things, the strange tale of the pineapple of love).
After a well-deserved round of applause we broke for Christmas, before meeting again early last month to begin preparation for our spring term sharing. This time, the company will be treating us to a scripted performance on the Globe stage, made up of short scenes from twelve Shakespeare plays and poems, all looking at the theme of ‘families’.
Making use of some ‘greatest hits’ like Othello and Romeo and Juliet, as well as lesser-known works like Cymbeline and Sonnet 37, the company’s March Sharing promises to show Shakespeare’s families in all their dysfunctional glory – with, if we are lucky, a few happy endings thrown in.
With the parts assigned and the read-throughs completed, we can begin to knuckle down to the business of rehearsing. Add that to the theatre trips and performances we’ve got coming up this term and there won’t be a dull moment for the Southwark Youth Theatre in 2018.
We’re also running a special offer for our Guided Tours & Exhibition -tickets for children have been reduced to just £5 (down from £7.50) when booking online in advance.
As part of the Exhibition, families can also enjoy free live demonstrations, including of Elizabethan dressing, sword fighting and seeing the working of a replica printing press. These demonstrations take place daily between 11.00am to 4.00pm and are included in your tour ticket (which lasts all day, so you can pop out for lunch and come back in the afternoon if you please).
As part of the Tours & Exhibition we also have a printed Family Trail and an audio guide for younger visitors.
In our Underglobe area throughout half-term, you’re free to just come sit for a quiet moment away from the Southbank. There will be cushions, beanbags and mats in this indoor area, and children’s books to read. There will be a separate buggy park area for the day.
“If there was ever a play that questions gender… this is it.”
In this Q&A, Director Michael Oakley discusses his upcoming production of Much Ado About Nothing, which is this year’s Playing Shakespeare 2018 with Deutsche Bank - our annual performances for schools, families and those new to Shakespeare.
The first ever Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production was Much Ado About Nothing and that was your first professional gig, wasn’t it?
Yes, I was Assistant Director on it. It’s a play that means an awful lot to me. I remember the response from the students was incredibly raw and truthful. It was thrilling.
Pictured: Jacqueline Defferary and Tas Emiabata in rehearsals for Much Ado About Nothing (Playing Shakespeare 2005). Photo by Andy Bradshaw.
How are you going about preparing for this production?
The Globe space is different from anywhere else and it marries well with this play because the audience are sometimes put in a position where they are more in the know than the characters on stage. In order for that to work to its best advantage and create tension in the scenes, you have to have a strong relationship with your audience in the set up. The Globe is the ideal place for this interaction to be fully realised as it creates such a unique experience between actor and audience.
These performances last around an hour and a half. What has been your approach to cutting the text?
The play is easier to cut than others – there’s an Elizabethan rule that Beatrice and Benedick rather brilliantly embody, where you never give just one example, you always give four or five to illustrate your point. When you take some of that away, the story becomes much more direct.
In a play about love, why do you think there’s so much prose?
It’s often said that verse exists only when the characters are telling the truth, but in the one scene that’s entirely in verse in this play, the characters are lying! I think there’s a sense in this play that the characters don’t always know how to cope with their feelings and that might be why there’s more prose. This gives more danger to the language because you don’t know when people are telling the truth and sometimes they don’t know when they’re telling the truth themselves – there’s constant misinterpretation and deceit. The only time Beatrice ever speaks in verse is this rather beautiful moment where she’s heard a few home truths and she asks, ‘What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?’ and she’s devastated about that, and that’s so illuminating and wonderful.
This use of language as a sort of protective armour is why I feel this is such a good play for young people. We self-preserve and self-project the image that we want other people to see. This focus on how you are perceived by your peers and how they respond to you is an important theme for the characters in this play. It’s only when the characters realise that actually telling the truth, and that being open with each other is the better way to live – that they grow up and move on.
I think that’s what Shakespeare always does in his plays, especially in the comedies, he offers his characters’ mistakes as examples and invites us to respond to them and recognise ourselves in them.
I know you’re particularly interested in the Hero and Claudio relationship…
The main narrative of the text is the appalling deceit of Hero by Claudio which has the most dreadful consequences for everyone. I think it’s important that we build up to that moment and then look at the effects of it. Hero becomes a very different character when she’s not with her father – she becomes much more in command. In some scenes, she’s as witty and vivacious as Beatrice, but she has a father who she has to please.
Claudio undertakes one of the biggest emotional shifts in the play, and I’d argue, one of the biggest emotional shifts in the whole canon. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes (who’s like Claudio ten years down the line) talks about his ‘re-creation.’ He recognises the need to see things differently after the crisis he’s faced and I think Claudio has to do that too.
For me, one of the most telling lines in the whole play is when Claudio finds out Hero isn’t dead and says, ‘Sweet Hero, now thy image doth appear in the rare semblance that I lov’d it first.’ He still hasn’t grown up and it’s not until he sees her, and not his image of her, that he can change.
How has the time that we live in and this particular audience influenced your work on the play?
We’re talking more about gender now and if there was ever a play that questions gender – this is it. The world of social media makes us much more aware of what people think and say about us now too. On Instagram we select the image we want to project of ourselves for the world to see.
And it’s a world where reputations can be ruined in a moment…
Absolutely. Look at Snapchat and the problems there are in schools when people post comments about images which can be devastating and destructive. Reputation, honour, our sense of self-worth, and how they are linked to our image is what this play questions and explores. Part of my job is to extract the thematic strands that make it more immediate and direct for a younger audience today. Some of those strands have gained an urgency today that they didn’t have ten years ago.
Tell us about your ideas for how music will feature.
Music is really important in this play. It’s referred to in the text so many times. The last line, ‘Strike up, pipers,’ is key and the two songs in the play are very important musical moments. The first, ‘Sigh no more, ladies’, could be the catchphrase of the whole play. The music at the tomb when Claudio goes through his ‘reformation’ should be very emotive and visceral. Shakespeare knows that sometimes words aren’t enough and that music can move us in a different way.
What questions are you hoping the audience will take away from this production?
Much Ado About Nothing is always called a comedy and I think it’s wonderfully funny but it also very nearly becomes a tragedy. In the final scene, the play forgives Claudio, but whether as an audience member we go for it or not is something I would love everyone to walk out asking themselves. Hero forgives Claudio, could I? Shakespeare often presents difficult questions and doesn’t always make it an easy ride for his audience.
Pictured: Tom Davey, Olly Fox, Charlyne Francis. Tyler Fayose, Emilio Doorgasingh, Rachel Winters, Etta Murfitt, Michael Oakley, Charlotte Mills & Fiona Hampton in rehearsals. Photography: Cesare de Giglio.
The Shakes-peers Collective is made up of 16 individuals - many identifying as socially excluded and with a range of access and support needs.
We will be facilitating four sessions over the coming months and these are co-led by a Shakespeare’s Globe Education Practitioner and the Open Access Arts Team.
Using Shakespeare’s plays as inspiration, the company have been exploring the connection between themselves, each other, our words and our spaces.
In session one, this incredibly talented and diverse group dived straight into a workshop. Along with actor Beru Tessema, and Jeanette Rourke,Amanda Bass and Victoria
Latham Kelly
(project leaders from Open Access Arts) the group looked at Shakespeare’s words and stories in their original context and a contemporary setting.
At the end of the session, the group wrote a collective poem to express how their time together had been.
You are amazing. I am privileged to have spent time with you A group that is filled with joy Happy Fun A room full of sparkle I am so moved by everyone’s power and confidence! WONDERFUL! Feel it, give yourself to it. Don’t fear. Accept yourself for once. It’s time. I feel the energy vibrating in the room STRONG I will express myself to the fullest Wow! The power of the stage To release, to forget oneself, and smile. As an opened Forget-Me-Not Shakespeare has filled my heart and spread his seed again. Beautiful relief to be breathing hopeful in the creative company of others Transformation by simple means. Releasing my inner power to motivate my confidence. Wonderful feeling and blessed to break through. It is amazing to be here Empowering. The floorboards are mine. They didn’t creak, or did they moan. I stood, I looked. I acknowledged the space. You’re mine It was beautiful to be in Shakespeare’s spirit
On 8 January we ran our first workshop as part of a new collaboration with Open Access Arts (OAA), St Mungo’s and The Clement James Centre. The Shakes-peers Collective is made up of 16 individuals - many identifying as socially excluded and with a range of access and support needs.
Using Shakespeare’s plays as inspiration, the company have been exploring the connection between themselves, each other, our words and our spaces.
As well as joining to write a collective poem, the group will be sharing their experiences in the form of blogs. Shakespeare’s Globe Practitioner and Actor Beru Tessema reflects on the first two sessions.
I step out into the space, open the stage doors and see the participants run on to the stage - a brilliant start to our work. No matter how many times I step on to that stage it remains magical. I could see this discovery of the magic in each member of our group.
We walked on the stage with open arms, breathing in the space, connecting to the space. Making real contact to the space, giving ourselves to it and being part of it. The group then took the space further by speaking the immortal words “To be or not to be."
The most moving and extraordinary moment came when we took some time and just watch each other connect to the space with open arms in silence. This was extraordinary because the singularity and wonder of each member of the group was revealed in the space.
We went to the rehearsal room where we chose speeches and started the journey of connecting with Shakespeare’s words. We finished this fantastic first session with a poem we wrote together. The words of The Shakes-peers Collective has the truth of Shakespeare.
In our second sessions, taking the speeches to the stage was super exciting. The group’s connection to the space was immediate. An ease and confidence was growing. We all belong on this stage. We can feel this now.
Each member took turns speaking the speech individually while the rest of the group responded by repeating out loud the words or the lines that resonated with us. We were communicating with each other. Call and response showed us how this absence of a ‘fourth wall’ goes to the heart of Globe’s practice. I heard the speeches in a way I’d not heard them before because of the depth and truthfulness of connection.
In the rehearsal space we explored our connection to the speeches further by drawing our self portraits. This was deeply inspiring and nourishing to see and listen to. The group shared their lived experiences, responses to speeches and what became clear is the link between the members of the group and the depth of the ideas Shakespeare explores in the speeches. It was profound. The ownership the members of the group found for their speeches was powerful. I can’t wait for our next session!
In this new series of blogs, we’re going to take you behind the scenes of our Guided Tours & Exhibition. Open all year round, the tour gives you an opportunity to learn more about this unique building and its most famous playwright, Shakespeare.
In this post, Exhibition Assistant Claire Reeves talks about how stage effects would have been created in Shakespeare’s time.
Facing tough competition from neighbouring theatres, such as the Rose and Swan, Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men, had to fight hard to keep their share of the audience. So, like blockbuster movie producers today, they often looked to special effects to help wow audiences and keep them coming back for more.
There is the famous story of how, on the 29th June 1613, the company fired a cannon above the stage as part of a performance of Henry VIII. Part of the wadding flew out and landed on the thatched roof, starting a fire that would lead to the theatre burning to the ground. This was just one of the special effects used in Elizabethan Theatres.
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most spectacular plays, featuring raging storms, magic and even fairies. It also features one of Shakespeare’s most spectacular special effects. In Act Three Scene Three Prospero leads part of the shipwrecked party to a grand feast conjured by the spirit Ariel. However, just as the group reaches out to take the food Ariel ‘clasps his wings upon the table and, with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes.’ So how, without Prospero’s magic books, could Shakespeare’s company make a table of food disappear before the audience’s very eyes?
The answer is simple: with a cleverly designed Trick Table. The table would be brought onto stage elaborately decorated with the magical feast. However, what the audience doesn’t realise is this table is carefully weighted so that once a pin was removed the top of the table would flip over to reveal the blank table top, concealing the feast below. The actors would crowd round the table, appearing to grab food from the feast. This meant that when the table flipped the audience couldn’t see the movement so when the actors step away in shock the food seems to have magically disappeared.
Of course The Tempest doesn’t just require magical special effects, it also needs a storm! Whilst you could be forgiven for thinking that there is enough rain and wind in a British Summer to make storm effects unnecessary in an open air theatre, Shakespeare and his company didn’t agree! Instead they came up with numerous ingenious machines to help ensure that, even on the brightest days, you got the full force of Prospero’s Tempest!
The easiest way to create the sound of thunder was by banging drum in the Tiring House behind the stage. However, they all produced a device called a Thunder Run which was a wooden trough attached to a stand similar to a see-saw. This would be placed in the Sound Attic above the stage. A stagehand would then place a cannon ball in the groove and roll it from one end to the other to create a rumbling sound. To complete the effect they also use a device called a Swevel to create lightening. This was a wire reaching from the roof of the heavens to the stage bellow. Gunpowder could be purchased from a grocer or ironmonger and used to make a firecracker that could be lit to fly down the wire to the stage, sending sparks all the way.
And, of course, Lear cannot cry ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks’ without the wind. To create the sound of wind they had a large cylinder covered in fabric. When a handle on the side was turned the cylinder would rotate, moving the fabric and creating the sound of howling winds. This technique is still used on our stage today. In fact the wind machine used in our 2008 production of King Lear can be found in our Exhibition, so why not come and have a go at creating a storm yourself?
Visit our Exhibition and find out more about other special effects, like flying gods, demons emerging from hell and of course how they achieved all of the blood and gore needed for all of Shakespeare’s tragedies!
In the spirit of Shakespearean tradition, the company will allow the audience to decide which of the three plays they would like to see, with a voting mechanism to be determined over the course of rehearsals.
The full cast includes: Luke Brady, Steffan Cennydd, Cynthia Emeagi, Sarah Finigan, Colm Gormley, Russell Layton, Rhianna McGreevy and Jacqueline Phillips.
“In the past decade we’ve toured across the world to castles, refugee camps, country houses and theatres. But one thing we never leave behind is the spirit of The Globe – in a shared space with story, storyteller and audience, we celebrate Shakespeare’s work with as many people as possible. But we’re keen to push the experiment further, so we asked, what would Shakespeare do? Following in Shakespearean tradition, our merry band will have three plays up their sleeve, and, for many performances, the responsibility to choose the entertainment will be given back to the most powerful person in our household: the audience. It’s experimental, it’s experiential, it’s Shakespearean, it’s shared, and it’s at the heart of all that we do.” Artistic Director Designate Michelle Terry
Which writer wrote the story The
Little Match Girl?
a)
William Shakespeare
b)
Hans Christian
Andersen
c) Honoré de Balzac
Send your answer to marketing@shakespearesglobe.com by midday on Friday 2 March 2018, specifying which performance you would like to attend and how many tickets you would like. You can see all performance dates and times below. We will contact the winners on the same email address as the one used to enter the competition.
Our Shakes-peers Collective company have been taking part in workshops and blogging about their experiences here at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Open Access Arts’ Jeanette Rourke describes the group’s latest session.
If you were a type of dessert, based on how you feel now, what dessert would you be? There were lots of fizzy sherbets in the room today but I’m pretty sure I’d be a Banoffee Pie!
We always ‘check-in’ like this, in a fun way, at the top of our sessions. Here we all were together for the third time. We huddled together to do a pencil sketch of how the sharing of our work may be next week. Amanda and Victoria support the group whilst having the all important tea and biscuits. That done, its off to the GLOBE STAGE! Each time it is SO exciting, it is such a magical place.
We make a few simple ‘staging’ decisions and off we go! Each person ‘performing’ the pieces we have been working on, with such raw honesty. Amazing responses have also been written by some the group and we listen in wonder.
Shakespeare’s words and our words shared in this spellbinding place, how extraordinary is that! For some that have joined us, these workshops are the first time they have ever been in real contact with Shakespeare’s language and the “I don’t know what this is” of our first session has melted away.
By allowing ourselves to be open to the process, magical things have happened. As Shakespeare said, “you are an alchemist; make gold of that.”
Today, most actors are self-employed freelancers, but this was wholly inadvisable in Shakespeare’s time.
In Elizabethan England the term for self-employed was ‘vagrant’ and punishments were worse than just paying your National Insurance twice. A vagrant would wander around in search of work and risk being branded, fined or imprisoned in the process. To avoid such association, aspiring actors joined playing companies. Being a member of a company protected you from vagrancy laws – you had somewhere to belong. Young Shakespeare was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the Lord Chamberlain being their patron. They later became the King’s Men, the premier theatre company of the time. Members of the aristocracy or the royal family often lent their name to companies, which, in addition to a financial benefit, also gave the company prestige and status.
Each company had a company manager. In the case of Lord Chamberlain’s Men this was impresario James Burbage, responsible for the first purpose-built theatre in London (named, with great imagination, The Theatre), and then The Globe in 1599. James wasn’t an actor, but his son Richard played many of Shakespeare’s leads, including Hamlet, Richard III and Othello. (Richard also, allegedly, shares my birthday.)
Richard was at the top of the actors’ hierarchy. Below him were 15 or so men and boys, all aware of their place. The older, more experienced actors would play the mature roles, such as Polonius in Hamlet, senior lords in the history plays. Lower down the company, actors would get two or three roles per play. As you might know, many of Shakespeare’s plays have fairly sizeable casts so there must have been a great deal of multi-role going on. At the bottom of the company are the apprentices, young boys attached to an older actor to learn their trade. These lads play the young Princes in Richard III, pages and children of nobles. Once they have learned a little stagecraft, but before their voices break, they might play the female characters, Viola, Rosalind, Imogen. Not every boy player went on to be a professional adult actor, in fact, very few of them did, although one or two were noted as being brilliant.
The share-holders in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were, in some reports, a band of brothers. Leaving each other gifts in their wills and sticking together for many years, these were the few who had put up money to build the Globe of 1599. These players were the backbone of the company. Some say that Shakespeare knew his men so well he wrote specific parts for specific actors, roles that suited their styles and manners. It’s certainly likely that the Fool or Clown parts differ due to the contrasting playing styles of the two comedians in the company, Will Kemp (who upon leaving the Chamberlain’s Men morris danced from London to Norwich, as you do) then the slightly wittier, better behaved Robert Armin.
I wonder if these men and boys had any idea that in over 400 years, actors would still be playing those roles, saying those lines. That they would become some of the most revered roles in theatre. Although the names of many of these players are now lost, as members of the company for which Shakespeare wrote they certainly made their mark.
Elisa De Grey, Ben Thompson, Craig Leo, Ayve Leventis and John Leader
Directors Finn Caldwell and Toby Olié (Gyre & Gimble)
Craig Leo, John Leader and Elisa De Grey
Puppet Supervisor Daisy Beattie
Ayve Leventis, Ben Thompson, Elisa De Grey, Craig Leo and John Leader
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons - A Reimagining: In rehearsal
The magical puppeteers from Gyre & Gimble (The Lorax, War Horse, The Grinning Man) and our talented cast have been working hard to bring you Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons - A Reimagining, recomposed by Max Richter.
For the last twelve years, Shakespeare’s Globe and Deutsche Bank have been working together to support young people’s cultural education through Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank. This flagship project gives all state secondary school students in London and Birmingham, many of whom have never been to the theatre before, the opportunity to see a live Shakespeare production at the Globe for free alongside workshops in schools, CPD sessions for teachers and innovative online resources.
For the second year, Shakespeare’s Globe and Deutsche Bank are proud to have joined forces with HeForShe, UN Women’s solidarity movement for gender equality, and we are delighted to announce Much Ado About Gender, an evening of discussion and performance as part of HeForShe London Arts Week 2018 on Tuesday 13 March.
Focusing on how art influences our cultural perceptions of gender, the discussion will consider Much Ado About Nothing– the play being performed to thousands of secondary school students for this year’s Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank. This thrilling 90-minute, fully-staged production empowers young people to challenge their own perceptions of gender and relationships as they follow the turbulent romances between Hero and Claudio, and Beatrice and Benedict, and explores what loyalty, chivalry, and true love really mean.
‘These are important stories. They raise so many issues relevant to young people. Much Ado About Nothing invites us to challenge our preconceptions about image and the way we present ourselves to each other and society. Particularly relevant in the world today, that in our search for truth, common sense and instinct should prevail as we learn from mistakes and forgive.’ Michael Oakley, Director
The panel discussion will be chaired by Eileen Taylor, Global Head of Regulatory Management at Deutsche Bank. She will be joined by:
Laura Haynes – UN Women National Committee UK Chair Michael Oakley– Director of Much Ado About Nothing Chris Nayak– Learning Consultant at Shakespeare’s Globe Danielle Bumford– Teacher at St Thomas the Apostle College in South London
It’s National Apprenticeship Week, and our four Apprentices Ria-Renee, Pedro, Joshua and Jadzia wanted to share their experiences working at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Our Apprenticeship Scheme employs these 4 young people who work across our Theatre, Communications, Education and Visitor Experience teams. They are working full-time and studying for Level 2 qualifications at Lewisham Southwark College (in Live Events and Promotion, Business Administration and Cultural Venue Operations).
With us for a year, the Apprentices are valued members of our Globe community, contributing amazing work to the different projects they are engaging with.
‘Working at the Globe is very active and very fun - I have achieved and will achieve more amazing experience here.’ Ria-Renee
‘Working at Shakespeare’s Globe is a fulfilling and enjoyable experience.’ Pedro
‘I have grown to love working at the Globe, getting to do what I love and developing my skills on a daily basis. Being one of the first Apprentices on the scheme makes it even more exciting. Anyone who wants to become an Apprentice here should know how great of an opportunity it is.’ Joshua
‘I am really honoured to work at the Globe. It has opened my eyes to new possibilities and I am delighted to be a part of the scheme. Apprentices are the way forward!’ Jadzia
We are excited to see what great things these guys go on to do in the future!
Today, as well as celebrating National Apprenticeship Week (#NAW2018), we’re cheering a massive congratulations to our apprentice Jadzia for her big achievement last night at the Lewisham Southwark College Apprenticeship Awards.
Jadzia won Creative Apprentice of the Year Award - a well-deserved recognition of all the amazing work she is doing here with us and at college. Well done Jadzia!
In addition, we successfully scooped the Apprenticeship Employer of the Year Prize, another fantastic result.
A very successful night in Southwark for Shakespeare’s Globe!
Brendan O’ Hea (Director) and Isabel Marr (Assistant Director).
Rhianna McGreevy.
Cynthia Emeagi, Russell Layton, Colm Gormley, Steffan Cennydd, Jacqueline Phillips, Rhianna McGreevy, Sarah Finigan and Luke Brady.
#GlobeOnTour 2018 in Rehearsal
Our #GlobeOnTour company are in rehearsals. This year they will take Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice on tour to various venues across the world.
Some of the performances will be decided beforehand, but for others the choice of play will often be given to the audience on the evening of the performance, in order to experiment with how a company would have toured in Shakespeare’s day.
As I write this, I’m two weeks past my viva – the meeting where a student is required to defend their completed PhD thesis, answering questions posed by two senior academics. Happily, I now get to call myself Doctor Gilchrist.
It’s been a long process, an adventure, from Shakespeare enthusiast to doctor of early modern drama. And the journey started, academically at least, with an application form to KCL and Shakespeare’s Globe MA in Shakespeare Studies.
I have a BA, and general background, in theatre studies. I had worked on a number of productions of Shakespeare’s plays over the years, in a role we called co-directing but which would probably now be called dramaturgy – I filled gaps that needed filling: talked to the actors one-on-one, composed songs for our folk-rock wayward sisters in Macbeth, researched the plays, read all the Arden footnotes etc. I wrote a play of my own, Forgiving Shakespeare, a comedy in verse about Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Cervantes, and Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith. I read books, and books, and books, about Shakespeare. But I’d never thought I could “do” Shakespeare for a living.
For some reason, around the end of 2011 it all fell together and I realised I spent more time reading and thinking about Shakespeare and his world than almost anything else. Without realising, I’d stumbled on the thing I was meant to be doing. Back to that application form.
The KCL and Shakespeare’s Globe MA in Shakespeare Studies runs, at the King’s College London end, from the English department. As such, I was an unusual candidate – out of further education for many, many, years, and with no English literature experience since my A-levels. Yet I soon found, in a good way, that a grounding in English Literature offered only partial preparation for the MA. For those used to studying Shakespeare and early modern drama only on the page, only as a kind of refined form of novel – reading the characters for psychological dimensions, arguing about motive and metaphor – the MA could be a shock.
There were classes on textiles and costume, the most valuable properties owned by any early modern playing company or theatre owner; sessions on music, and make-up – Globe Education’s Farah Karim-Cooper has literally written the book on cosmetics in early modern drama: I remember the reverent hush the day we passed a pot of shimmering pearl powder around the class; we learned about the strange acoustics of playhouses, the economics of touring, the poetry of doubling, how the person sitting on the throne of England determined what did, and didn’t, get played; we learned about the cultural pressures that caused, shaped, and sustained Shakespeare’s plays, pressures that are often left invisible by more traditional teaching methods. Central to the MA was its location – within the Globe complex itself.
There was always a sense of practical activity, of theatre at work –crowds audible as we walked to class, costumed actors swooping past, props under construction in the car park. This helped the theories, the history we were learning feel less abstract. We could study theories of bare-stage, open-air performance, and then see theory put into practice from the pit of the theatre itself. Was Henry VI different when performed over ten hours in torrential rain? It was. It was.
Meanwhile, through the modules offered on the KCL campus, the culture of the Elizabethan-Jacobean world was uncovered. Just as Shakespeare’s Globe afforded greater understanding of the material pressures and conditions of theatre and performance, at KCL we learned about the production, economies, and peculiarities of playbooks, those ephemeral, fragile, largely disposable little volumes without which we would have no access to the texts of early modern drama. Who printed these books, once the players were done with their scripts? Who bought them? How much did they cost? Why were so many hundreds of plays printed? Why were so many thousands of plays never printed?
When I started teaching early modern drama at my current university, Roehampton, I took some students on a tour of the Globe. They were able to see the Sam Wannamaker Playhouse, a version of the kind of space in which, for example, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi was first performed. We then crossed the river via Blackfriars Bridge to the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral, once the centre of the London book trade. We stood on the spot where, once it had been published, The Duchess of Malfi was first put up for sale by a bookseller called John Waterson from his wooden stall.
From the Globe, we were able to retrace the footsteps, and the lifecycle, of a single play and its customers, from stage to stall. On this theme, if you want to read more about what I learned, I adapted my MA dissertation on the play Mucedorus– the most frequently published play of the early modern era – into an article that was published last year by the journal Shakespeare.
Beyond the formal parameters of the course itself, there were constant opportunities to participate in and observe events put on by Globe Education. Of particular impact for me was Read Not Dead, the regular stagings of little-or-never-performed early modern plays put on by skilled actors with a single morning’s rehearsal. It opened my eyes to strange and beautiful plays I would never otherwise have been able to see; it provided valuable insight into how plays work in performance – a play that may have been dismissed by literature scholars as unpoetic or crude can reveal subtleties and depth of artistry when spoken and acted aloud.
Finally, there are Globe Education’s internships – open only to MA students when I was there, now open to applications across the UK. I was lucky enough to get a placement, and even luckier that this coincided with the opening of the SWP. I filled a bulging folder full with articles and research for the director of the SWP’s inaugural production, The Duchess of Malfi and then, like all dramaturgs and researchers will do, I scrutinised the final production to see if my research had had any influence.
To learn at Shakespeare’s Globe was also to conduct research, watch plays for fun, and make long-sustained personal and professional friendships that have enriched my life and career ever since. It was, and is, a dynamic, forward-thinking, challenging and experimental institution. I learned a lot.
We are the 2018 #GlobeEnsemble (currently rehearsing HamletandAs You Like It) and we’re getting into the swing of things. Unlike many other previous Shakespeare’s Globe companies, our group really have been starting from the very beginning.
When we first got together, ‘starting from scratch’ was a key part of our collective brief. All production choices made so far and to be made in the coming weeks will spring from what happens in our rehearsal room.
In the usual theatre-making process, for Shakespeare’s Globe and many other companies, more often than not these decisions are made months before rehearsals start, often months before the production is even cast. For our #GlobeEnsemble, this process really did begin as a completely blank canvas.
The rehearsal room belongs to all of us equally (the designer, the composer, the choreographer, the actors and the directors) in its entirety - it is a test tube in which everything and anything can be flung in and we can be as curious as we wish.
As we continue work, many ideas will be skimmed off, some will dissolve and be completely forgotten… but some powerful ideas will form crystals and be eventually assembled into final productions that we welcome you to from 25 April 2018.
Unusually, this rehearsal process is also ‘open’ which means others (such as staff, students, practitioners and other directors) can sit in the room at any time to watch the plays develop. We think it can be beneficial to share rehearsal processes and experiences, especially with Shakespeare and especially when experimentation is at play. Also, the Globe Theatre is an audience-dominated playing space, more like a football stadium than a conventional theatre! The audience have a huge influence on the performance and so having a busy rehearsal room prepares us for that busy, distracted playing space.
We’ve been thinking about how else we can ‘open’ this space to you, so for the next month we’re going to be taking you inside the test tube digitally via a series of videos and photos. We want you to feel and breathe this process as much as we do. Follow the hashtag #GlobeEnsemble and get ready to see what gets thrown into the mix.
