All the world’s a Globe

“I don’t regret it. I’ve no animus against him. He was hurt by it, and I regret the fact that I wrote it out of a ball of rage, but it was true to that moment.”

The ball of rage in question bounced out of Dromgoole’s dismay at the way the new, edgy theatre of the first half of the 1990s was blunted and cheapened in the second half. Drama was taken, as he said to me at the time, “down this glitzy route which has destroyed its validity and truth”. Dromgoole had every right to say this. His own record — at the Bush, the Old Vic and the Whitehall — was impeccably edgy, and his subsequent reign at the Oxford Stage Company wasn’t too bad, either.

Now, startlingly, he has taken on the Globe, succeeding its first director, Mark Rylance. This is startling because, in spite of Rylance’s unending and heroic efforts to give the Globe cred, it remains seated somewhat below the salt at the luvvie table. And though it is, in fact, rather edgy, nobody really sees it that way. Even after nine years, one suspects that large parts of the theatrical critical establishment think it should sell Union Jack oven gloves and have “Ye Olde ” before its name. But, for Dromgoole, the Globe is the next logical battleground in the war on “emeurgh”.

“I go to the theatre to be more intelligent than I am, and when you’re really tuned into the house, you feel sharper and more fleet-footed than you do as an individual, and that’s what I really enjoy. I enjoy having my game raised.”

In other words, being in an alert, alive and engaged audience is what matters, and that is exactly what happens at the Globe. During Measure for Measure, he says, the audience was full of “subversive, naughty energy” and “looking for a dirty joke” in every line.

“The building is right, it’s the right place for Shakespeare. The relationship with the audience is the right way to approach an audience. They make an event of it, and the plays start to happen in ways that I’ve never seen them happen before. That’s why it’s a success, and why it scares the hell out of everybody in the theatrical world.”

He sees the Globe as overthrowing 340 years of theatrical orthodoxy since the Restoration. Proscenium arches replaced the in-the-round style of Shakespeare’s day, and control shifted from the audience to the stage. In this context, the Globe — far from being a sub-aesthetic tourist attraction, as many, including me, thought it would be — becomes, in fact, the beating heart of theatrical London. Many would find this idea absurd, but at least, thanks to Rylance, it’s on the agenda. “He is a fantastically brave man, and one of the best actors we’ve had since the old theatrical knights. He has the courage of his conviction to such a degree, nobody else even gets close.

“When this place started, there were so many battles to fight against prejudices. Mark had to constantly fight all those prejudices and make it work. I’m lucky enough to come in at the end of that, and everybody knows it can work, so now we can see how else it can work.”

Rylance also had oddities, such as his adherence to the surely by now discredited view that Shakespeare did not, in fact, write Shakespeare, and his frequently bizarre stagings, but the Globe audience, says Dromgoole, was always prepared to go with him.

One thing Rylance didn’t do, however, and that Dromgoole will, is put on new plays. “The original Globe was the greatest new-writing theatre in history — it knocks the Royal Court into a cocked hat. That’s what I’m going to do. There will be new plays here, a greater ensemble of casting, a different sort of director and possibly a greater consistency of style. We’ll feel our way and decide as we go.” There will be two new plays this year: one by Simon Bent about pirates, called Under the Black Flag; and one from Howard Brenton about Abelard and Héloïse, called In Extremis.

“Writers are absolutely over the moon to be asked to write for the Globe. Lots of playwrights live their life in a ghetto, or hidden away in a black box, and suddenly we say, ‘You can do this big play with 19 characters, lots of music, big story, bit of pageantry, some cheap stunts and jokes, and language that’s got a little bit of independent life to it.’ Writers go, ‘Yes, please, I’d love to do that.’”

For the moment, however, he cannot stray too far from the all-Shakespeare formula. “For the time being, all I can do is set out my stall and do Shakespeare heavily for the next year or two. This year, everybody is going Shakespeare bonkers. The RSC is doing the complete Shakespeare canon, and there’s a load of books coming out.”

One of those books is by Dromgoole. It’s called Will & Me, and will be published in March. The title is significant. His deep belief is that Shakespeare is too vast to be captured in any one critical formula; nevertheless, he is a part of almost everybody’s life. It is as if he is more like a landscape, or even a whole country, than a mere writer. As a result, the best one can hope to do is speak of “my” version, rather than a definitive statement about the man in full. Dromgoole prepared for this project with typical commitment.

“I walked from Holy Trinity in Stratford to the Globe, long before I knew I was getting this job. I needed to do some sort of act of homage to the subject of the book. It wasn’t a pilgrimage — that would be too highfalutin. It was some sort of mark of respect, a lesson in your own humility before the subject. It’s an intellectually lightweight book, but, basically, it’s about growing up with Shakespeare.”

Dromgoole’s Shakespearian and theatrical credentials cannot be doubted. Then again, neither could Rylance’s. The issue at the Globe, therefore, is: will the change of director do anything to subvert the prevailing critical scepticism about the whole project? Fairly or unfairly, the critics have always treated this theatre with a certain aloofness. They are, Dromgoole believes, simply missing the point. The Globe works in ways they are not prepared to acknowledge.

“The fact that this place has been tremendously influential has passed by the intelligentsia. The critics all come and dump on it with gleeful regularity. Most of the theatrical community completely ignore it. Mark was aggrieved by it, but I think it has done its job in creating a commercial, successful theatre, with Shakespeare at the centre. To be honest, it would be quite easy to come here and put together a programme that would appeal to Michael Billington (The Guardian’s theatre critic), and immediately you’d see three-quarters of your audience disappear. And, as we haven’t got a subsidy, we haven’t got the luxury of seeing that happen.”

He points to the theatre’s education programme as “second to none”, and its cheap-ticket scheme as being imitated by all the big companies. His point is that, in spite of having no subsidy, the Globe does as much pro bono work as anybody.

And he goes ballistic at the suggestion that it’s just a tourist destination.

“We have a tiny proportion of foreign visitors: 16%-20%. English people come here, and they love it and they return. They find it special. Anyway, it’s great that tourists do come here. It’s what the Globe was built for, not just English people. The Italians didn’t throw up the Duomo in Florence just for the locals. All of these great edifices have always been there for tourists.”

Most important of all, in recent years, Shakespeare has been saved from academic oblivion. It is not so long ago, after all, that English dons were actually suggesting that we stop teaching his plays to under-14s, a move that would have gone some way to choking off our entire acting profession at birth. Now it would be unthinkable — Shakespeare has become weirdly popular. The BBC does modern versions of his plays and, strangely, Renault advertises its English-designed cars by pointing out that the French simply don’t have a comparable writer. He is not seen as “irrelevant” any more, but part of the world as it is.

Dromgoole thinks this is partly because the post-9/11 world has taken on a Shakespearian tone. But he is also convinced that the Globe has played a big part in all this.

“It is an astonishing achievement, genuinely astonishing. You go into any school at the moment — from the most beaten-up comprehensive to the smuggest private school — and they’ve all got one of those pictures of Shakespeare.”

Yet this remains a critical moment for the Globe. Rylance’s reign had its detractors, but he established the theatre, made it pay and provided a unique way of feeding the growing hunger for Shakespeare at home and abroad. Dromgoole is a thoughtful, funny and brave man, but he’s putting on some big boots — Rylance’s, of course, but also those of Big Will, the man nobody ever got and nobody ever will. I suspect they will fit like a glove.

“There’s no better life, is there? Is there anything else that can keep you constantly on your toes? You are always on some sort of rollercoaster ride with him. He has the power to do that, and you just keep running along behind him.” None of the leading Shakespeare scholars could keep up, he argues. “Not Harold Bloom, not Hazlitt, not Jan Kott. Nobody got Shakespeare, nobody fully got Shakespeare.”