The Spirit of Shakespeare

The original globe was built in 1599 and burned down in 1613 after a cannon malfunctioned.

In 1997 - the year I graduated from college - Sam Wanamaker built a replica. I've been wanting to see a play there ever since.

And I finally did it. The performance was King Lear (not my favorite of Shakespeare's plays) - with Lear played by Kevin McNally (Gibbs from Pirates of the Caribbean) and an excellent cast.

It was...in some ways it was the second best Shakespeare I've ever seen. In others? It was the best.

See, what I was expecting was that the performance would match the theater - that it would be Elizabethan-styled.

That isn't what I got.

The actors wore costumes that looked like they went thrifting. The stage swords were sticks with painted-on hilts. On a number of occasions, actors were pushed onto and off the stage in a cage cart. Special effects combined the theater's electric lights...with drums being played by the cast.

And the casting - the casting was what happens when the director stops caring about anything but who is right for the part. Gloucester, Cornwall and Cordelia were black. France was south Asian. Everyone else was white, regardless of how much sense it made. Kent was a woman - because. Just, as far as I can tell, because the director wanted Saskia Reeves. In the grand tradition of principal boys, the Fool was played by a woman but still called a boy. (And I'd give something to see Anjana Vasan, their Cordelia, do Juliet while she's still young enough to pull it off).

My verdict was not "This is the best Shakespeare I've ever seen" so much as "This is the most authentic Shakespeare I've ever seen."

Because, see, people take two approaches to Shakespeare. Either they try to do it the way they envision the Elizabethan theatre - 'the way Shakespeare did it' - and put everyone in fancy Elizabethan outfits, use the best props that look Elizabethan, etc. Or they put it in a different era.

This is the only time I have ever seen a Shakespeare company do it the way Shakespeare would do it now. The hotch potch casting was not only interestingly diverse and genuinely using talent, but also recalled a small traveling company who had to cast the people they have (and don't you dare tell me there was never a black man or boy on Shakespeare's stage - maybe there wasn't, but there were certainly black people around in Elizabethan London, and some of them could have been actors). The only reason Shakespeare didn't use women on his stage was because it was not done - but the gender flipping, including the female Kent disguising herself as a man is exactly the kind of thing he would have done.

And it wasn't done as high art. That's the thing.

It was done as popular entertainment. It was people standing around the stage and actors running off stage right through the crowd, actors calling out into the audience (sadly, too many people were wearing their best theater manners). The audience was a little bit too sober, but this is what the Elizabethan theater was. It was popular entertainment, performed by players who often struggled, who cast the talent they had and developed that talent until it shone. Nancy Meckler, with the ability to pull talent (many top actors want to do Lear) for this performance chose to cast in a way that honored that.

And it was brilliant.