The Knight of the Burning Pestle performed by the Shakespeare’s Globe (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) (review)

The recent opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London seems to herald a new period in the wider appreciation, at least in the UK, of Renaissance drama beyond the better-known Shakespearean repertory. The new playhouse is a very small venue in which the potential commercial success of a given play is not as determinant a factor in programming it as it is in the larger main house, in which a sustained inflow of cash from the box office is needed to keep the unsubsidized theater afloat. In addition, having a permanent Jacobean-style indoor playing space will permit performances all year round, as well as a new series of chamber music concerts, recitals, and chamber operas. Most importantly, the theater will enable fresh research into candlelit indoor performance in a way that has hitherto been impossible in any major professional theater.

The first production staged in this playhouse was The Duchess of Malfi, directed by Dominic Dromgoole with Gemma Arterton in the title role (on which, see Peter Kirwan’s review in this issue). The choice was appropriate, as it is a well-known play that provides numerous opportunities to investigate the various lighting effects of which the indoor playhouse is capable. The second production, however, attempted to take the experiment in a different direction, and to give an answer to some of the questions posed by Malfi. Among these, the most important was a generic one: if the occasionally stifling intimacy of the small venue and the sophisticated changes in its lighting succeeded in evoking the bleak fictional world of that tragedy, could they work as well for a riotous, joyous comedy such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle?

The lighting semiotics essayed in the space have so far been quite simple. In Malfiand Pestle, the light levels were generally raised for comic or public moments and lowered for tragic, serious, or private scenes. Under the hypothesis that the indoor theaters would have had windows that allowed sunlight to filter into the room, some electric light can be let into the auditorium through the doorways and a set of windows at the back of the galleries. When necessary, the curtains can be drawn on the doorways and the windows blocked with wooden shutters from the outside, leaving the auditorium lit solely by beeswax candles. In Malfimost of the play was staged under very low light levels, while in Pestleonly selected scenes—the appearance of Jasper’s ghost to Venturewell, Luce mourning Jasper in the coffin before he “revived”—were given this treatment.

As the audience came in, the actors playing George and Tim were lighting the candles, beckoning the chandeliers down from the ceiling with much hallooing, and offering a series of physical gags, including a moment when Tim’s breeches started to smoke as if they had caught fire from one of the candles. The Citizen and his Wife came into the pit with Rafe, and took a seat in the front row. The electric lights were lowered and then, under the warm light of the candles, Brendan O’Hea started speaking the prologue. When it was abruptly interrupted by the Citizen, the electric lights from the corridor came back on and the Wife climbed on stage to issue her instructions to the company. In common with the rest of the ensemble, the Citizen, the Wife, and Rafe wore Jacobean costume, not attempting to disguise the fact that they...