Introducing Research in Action
Globe Research Fellow and Lecturer Dr Will Tosh introduces this year’s Research in Action series.
The sun’s out, so it must be time to re-start Globe Education’s Research in Action series of experiments in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
Since the Playhouse opened in 2014, we’ve complemented the Theatre and Education Events seasons with regular practice-led research workshops in which academics and actors work together to investigate cruxes of early modern indoor performance practice.
How did asides work in the intimate interior of Elizabethan and Jacobean indoor playhouses? Can performers conjure the spirit of the great outdoors in candle-lit conditions? What effects can be produced by sinister woodwind music, or by boisterous drum beats and trumpet blasts?
Those of you who have attended a Research in Action workshop before will know that the process of discovery is a rewarding one. The Playhouse, our flexible tool for exploring early modern indoor playing, has helped us to understand that indoor performance was a broader, richer, more multi-faceted process than we have sometimes assumed: very short answers to the questions above are ‘very well’, ‘yes’ and ‘marvellous ones’. If you want longer answers, you’ll have to wait until my book, Playing Indoors: Performing Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, comes out next year with Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.
But we haven’t finished experimenting in the Playhouse, and this year we’ve invited some academic friends and colleagues to help us pose the questions. Tonight, Dr Sarah Lewis and Dr Emma Whipday (King’s College London) join us to investigate offstage sounds in early modern drama. Using extracts from Macbeth, The Atheist’s Tragedy, Othello and The Duchess of Malfi, we’ll explore the way in which the theatre fabric (offstage and on) can be used to create a soundscape of different fictional spaces.
On June 6, Prof Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) brings her expert knowledge of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta to the Globe. Marlowe’s tragedy was written for an amphitheatre but survives only in a printed edition from the 1630s, when the play was performed at the indoor Cockpit theatre. To what extent does the play as we now know it bear the marks of its ‘indoor’ heritage?
Finally, on 4 July Dr Eleanor Rycroft (University of Bristol) will work with us to unpick the little-known ‘place realist’ dramas of the 1630s: James Shirley’s Hyde Park, Thomas Nabbes’s Tottenham Court and Richard Brome’s The Sparagus Garden. How will we stage the bustle of street life in seventeenth-century London in the confines of the indoor playhouse?
As an audience member at a Research in Action workshop, your views and opinions count. As scholars, we depend on your observations and comments to help us understand the theatrical power of these astonishing dramas. I do hope you’ll join us for this summer’s interactive, eye-opening experiments.
(Image credit: AM Bickerton)
Forthcoming Research in Action workshops include SOUNDING OFFSTAGE WORLDS (Monday 9 May), MOVING MARLOWE: THE JEW OF MALTA ON THE CAROLINE STAGE on (Monday 6 June) and WALKING THE CITY IN THE INDOOR THEATRE (Monday 4 July). Find out more about the series and book tickets.
See what other Education events we have coming up.