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The Story, the Struggle, the Site: The Globe Theatre Will Return
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11341 |
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THE ARTS
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11 / 1986 |
1,886 Words |
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Jeff Church
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Reconstructing Shakespeare's Globe Theatre is one of those projects most people feel should have been done years ago. But it only takes a few unyielding types to shovel dirt over a good idea. For years, an American actor and producer named Sam Wanamaker has been coordinating efforts to rebuild the Bard's playhouse-ever since Wanamaker moved to London and visited the site. For what he saw was merely a little plaque on the wall noting what once stood there.
Now the green light has been given; the Globe will be rebuilt but it wasn't going to happen until a rather idiotic battle with a town council had been fought, according to Diana Devlin, administrator on the project, in this conversation with The World & I. The playhouse, as history dictated, was not built in London but in Southwark, a borough just across the Thames liver, because laws did not permit Shakespeare and his company to build their theater within the city limits. The feeling at the time was, says Ms. Devlin, "players are riotous and terrible." Similarly, the Southwark [Town] Council implied an equally disquieting accusation: They wanted nothing to do with the Globe, feeling that theater is elitist.
Just the opposite is true for Wanamaker and his staff, who aim to repopularize Shakespeare for the people, just as plays were in his day. Yet, the leader of the Southwark Council summed up his views by stating, "Shakespeare is a load of tosh" Still amused at the gentleman's comment, Ms. Devlin notes, "I was right there when he said it But you know, he's no longer the council's leader." And of all things, the struggle story of the Globe centered on a situation with Southwark's road sweepers. As the tale goes, according to Devlin:
There's about twenty of them and they pick up a cart in the morning and go trundling around Southwark picking up rubbish in the street then they trundle back again at about four in the afternoon. They figured largely in our dispute with Southwark Council when our purchase agreement was voided with the developer who owned the site. Because it was all quite legal, the council had to find grounds for voiding it. They couldn't just say, 'We don't like it,' though that's the fact. They had gotten very left wing and insisted it had to be housing. But in trying to find a reason, there were, on the site at the moment, some road sweepers kept there by the council. They said they couldn't rehouse them, so one of the press articles we did was to interview all of the road sweepers . . . One of them said, `If Sam Wanamaker and Shakespeare move in, I move out.' Now we've won the settlement, and the road sweepers are relocating.
The project had been brought to a complete halt over a seemingly incidental matter. It took a judge in the Chancery division of the High Court to help the parties to reach an agreement. He found the proposed alternative sites for the sweeps to be perfectly adequate they could have moved at any time and thus brought to a close a seventeen-year battle to allow the Globe site to be purchased. (As the judge delivered his statement, Wanamaker is said to have bowed his head.)
But in fact, the site purchased is not exactly where the Globe stood. It is 300 yards from where historians think the original once was, which now has one of the more modern bridges over part of it, plus several buildings between it and the river Thames. The reconstruction will be on a property very near the river, directly opposite Saint Paul's
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