Shakespearean Spectacles in London and Stratford

Near the close of The Tempest Prospero describes the fleeting nature of theatrical spectacle. The context is the wedding masque he has conjured for Ferdinand and Miranda, a masque evoking a timeless paradise in which spring and autumn, desire and fulfillment, are simultaneous. Ferdinand declares that he would live in this place forever. Prospero replies, the vision must end. As Prospero speaks, the masque, like “the great globe itself,” fades away, leaving neither rack nor wisp behind.

This summer in London and Stratford I attended a dozen plays by Shakespeare, and although I did not see The Tempest, I often considered Prospero’s words. A surprising number of performances, though none at the Globe, denied Prospero’s description of theater’s evanescence. With one notable exception at the newly renovated Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford and on Olivier’s former stage at the Old Vic, spectacle was substantial, indeed so insistent and remarkable, that it could not be exorcised from memory. Images were irrepressible—from a trapeze artist suspended over the trial scene in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Merchant of Venice to newsreels projected upon the stage walls in Sam Mendes’s Richard III at the Old Vic. The playgoer could not forget these images; they would not fade. Something, however, was subject to loss: Shakespeare’s language. Fixed on pageants, the audience was oblivious to the words that should summon theatrical spectacle and spell its importance.

Britain’s 2011 summer Shakespeare season was propitious. Founded in 1961 by Peter Hall, the Royal Shakespeare Company was celebrating its fiftieth birthday. It was, moreover, performing in a radically transformed space. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, a proscenium arch theater designed by Elisabeth Scott and opening its doors in 1932, had been renovated to achieve greater intimacy with the audience. In the original theater the distance between actors and audience yawned. If you sat in the last row, almost eighty-nine feet separated you from the stage. Altogether more compact the new three-sided theater brings over 80 percent of its audience within thirty-three feet of its thrust stage.

Clearly the actors’ engagement with the audience at Shakespeare’s Globe—that marvelous reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse in which Shakespeare’s own company once performed—influenced the Royal Shakespeare Company’s aspirations regarding its reconfigured space. At the Globe interaction between actors and audience is inevitable. At certain turns actors enter or exit through the yard, cheek by jowl with the groundlings who hiss villains to shame, cheer lovers, and extend their hands to players who kneel above them. When the performance ends, the crowd in the yard often dances in exuberant imitation of the company’s execution of a jig, galliard, or volt.

A conversation with Philip Cumbus, who began acting at the Globe in 2007, was enlightening. Cumbus confirmed that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s desire for an interactive space became more acute when the Globe began so fully to engage its audiences. Cumbus described how the Globe’s company introduces its actors not only to all members of its departments, but also to all parts of the building. This initiation produces a deep sense of connection, one that inspires actors to understand the building itself as an organism, a body in which you must locate the heart and the head, and from which you must expect spontaneous reactions.

The Royal Shakespeare Company has long possessed in the Swan a theater similar to the Globe’s wooden O. Praised by the company’s members as encouraging intimacy between actor and audience, the Swan has been called by Gregory Doran “a circle of ears.” I expected that the main theater, refashioned in the Transformation Project, would present a second such circle. I was largely wrong.

I saw three plays in the renovated Royal Shakespeare Theatre: The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. The comedies relied so heavily on visual spectacle that Shakespeare’s language seemed largely discarded. The spectacles, in turn, suppressed the comedies’ evocation of enchantment. Of the plays staged in the renovated theater, only Macbeth exploited that theater’s new intimacy...