My evening at Shakespeare's Globe didn't begin well; the audience was stuck queuing outside the theatre in the rain for a quarter of an hour because the set wasn't ready; presumably they didn't have enough stagehands to strike the set for King Lear and put up the set for The Frontline in time. I haven't yet seen Timon of Athens, which requires a big net to cover the theatre for Lucy Bailey's production (she did the same for Titus Andronicus last year), but I'm beginning to wonder whether under Dominic Dromgoole's direction the Globe is starting to move in a direction it wasn't really designed to travel. The good thing about the theatre is precisely that it isn't an infinitely flexible space; it's a Shakespearean stage of a certain fixed design, and the actors have to perform on it in daylight and in the open air with a minimum of technical help. When the stage gets extended out into the yard, as for some productions this year, there are real sightline problems for the audience in the upper tiers.
But that wasn't the real problem with this production of Che Walker's new play, specially written for this season. I like the idea of a really edgy, urban, London play on the Globe stage; I've seen most of the new work commissioned for the theatre since it opened its doors in 1997, but for some reason none of them seem to have worked. It's not an easy space to write for, but most of the new Globe plays have had something badly wrong with them, and this was no exception. This is an ensemble piece where none of the characters really get the time to establish themselves, where everyone talks at once and where the whole seems infinitely smaller than the individual parts. In short, it's an artistic mess. Che Walker says in the programme: 'I like to have overlapping speeches -- I've been wanting to experiment with this for a long time -- but it is important that people hear them all. It is the opposite of what happens in film where a director guides your attention. And different, too, from a proscenium arch theatre, where we all experience something similar together.' I've got news for the author - his experiment simply doesn't work. I became increasingly irritated by the inaudible simultaneous shouting of actors on different sides of the stage and I found it hard to follow what was going on. More importantly, because I douldn't focus, I ceased to care what was going on. Walker draws his inspiration from Camden Town and has created what is essentially a streetscape of low-life characters, including a gospelling Christian choir, drug addicts, dealers, a bouncer, an aspiring actor, a father looking for his lost daughter, tarts, nightclub performers, Ethiopians and Somalis, a hot dog seller in a dirty Glasgow Celtic shirt and an Afghan snackbar owner. Stick a microphone outside Camden Town tube station and this is pretty much what you get. But you need more than just raw chaos to make a convincing play. Black Watch by the National Theatre of Scotland was for me the peerless example of how to create an ensemble play where the whole is greater than the individual characters and their stories. There's a nice extract in the programme from Dombey and Son in which Dickens describes the chaos of Camden Town as the district is ripped apart to construct the railway. It sums up this play perfectly: 'There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspriring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.' Dickens' punchline describes the moment when order emerges from chaos and the railway begins to run: 'In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.' The problem with Walker's writing is that all we get is the dire disorder, not the railroad. The other shortcoming is that to write a real London play you need, as in Shakespeare and Jonson, the contrast between high and low characters, between rich and poor, and between the private and public spheres, between noise and silence. I would have liked to have seen one or two of Camden's wealthier residents, perhaps millionaire investment bankers, as a contrast to the lowlife. I left in disappointment at the interval, choosing the Whingers option of a glass of red wine across the road instead of staying for the second half. It wasn't standing as a groundling in the rain that dampened my spirits, but the poor writing and direction. At the interval the sun came out and created a beautiful evening rainbow over the Thames; I wish the play had had the same effect. I did however enjoy the music (there should have been more) and some of the individual performances, particularly Trystan Gravelle's cameo as the aspiring actor Mordechai Thurrock, stumbling into a payphone to make increasingly desperate invitations to a theatrical contact to come and see his one-man show. I also liked Paul Copley as a deluded father who keeps seeing his lost daughter in every female face, Jodie McNee as a junkie and Danny Lee Wynter as a transvestite. All four are to be seen to greater effect in the Globe's production of King Lear, as Kent, Edgar, Cordelia and the Fool respectively.
Finally, a memo to Dominic Dromgoole: to leave the audience standing in the rain while you change the scenery and to begin the production 15 minutes late without a word of explanation or apology is arrogant and amateurish, and it shows contempt for the people who have paid to come to your theatre. Remember, even if we've only paid a fiver to come in, you're the host and we're your guests.
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