A LETTER FROM LONDON: A Rain-Soaked Henry IV at The Globe Theatre, Plus The Bridge Project

By Ruth Leon
09 Aug 2010

Henry IV onstage at The Globe
Henry IV onstage at The Globe
Photo by John Haynes

In this month's column spotlighting London theatre — and its people, venues, trends and productions — writer Ruth Leon writes about the magic of The Globe.

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I sat this week for six hours on a hard backless bench in intermittently pouring rain, watching two Shakespeare plays in a single day. Why? The extraordinary charm of the round wooden Globe Theatre on Bankside is hard, if not impossible, to explain. It started with the American actor Sam Wanamaker, who arrived in England after World War II and demanded to be taken to Shakespeare's theatre. The baffled cab driver said there was no such thing. "Then we must build one," said the young actor.

It took him 47 years and he didn't live to see it opened by his daughter, the actress Zoe Wanamaker in 1997, but his legacy is here on the banks of the Thames, less than 100 yards from the 1599 original. This beautiful replica of Shakespeare's own theatre is circular, with covered galleries for the toffs like me and a partially covered playing area. But the vast majority of the audience are what are again known as groundlings — that is, they stand in the open area in front of the stage, uncovered, open to the elements which, on days like this, can be extremely elemental. There is nowhere to sit or lean and they are not, for fire regulations rules, allowed to occupy the aisles between the covered galleries, so there is no shelter at all.

Roger Allam as Falstaff and Jamie Parker as Prince Hal
photo by John Haynes
Thus, on a day more suited to April than July, alternating bright sunshine and torrential rain, stood a packed house for Dominic Dromgoole's lucid traditional production of Henry IV: Part 1, in the afternoon and, after a break to dry out, Henry IV: Part 2, in the evening. Despite my being seated undercover, I was proud to be in that audience of (mostly) young people in shorts and t-shirts because their only concession to the periodic deluges was to don hurriedly purchased plastic ponchos or to raise the hoods of their ubiquitous hoodies. Nobody left, no matter how wet they were.

For many, this was not only their first Shakespeare, it was their first-ever theatre experience and they loved it. Sopping wet, often cold, they were thrilled by the play, by the involvement with the actors who came and went through the audience, and by the bawdy jokes that Shakespeare inserts into many of his plays. Before the show, there were mummers, medieval entertainers whose broad humor and overt sexuality delighted the children in the audience. During the play, there are songs, period ballads to move the action along, and at the end, the entire cast dances — a joyous dance that, in Shakespeare's day, would have banished any residual sadness that might have been left by the play. There was no sadness at the Globe this week. At the end of the Henrys, at nearly 11:30 at night, the audience — wet, cold, tired — cheered, stamped in the puddles, and refused to leave until the cast came back on stage to receive their applause.

The cast, led by Roger Allam as Falstaff, to their everlasting credit, raised their well-trained actors' voices just enough to overcome the din of the rain and carried on with no more recognition of the weather than the occasional comic glance at the sky when the script makes reference to "a tempest" or "blow wind." Looking out at the Thames flowing past, where it has always been, just outside the theatre's courtyard, the inclemency of the weather brought all of us in the Globe closer together, closer to the cast who were weathering it with us, and, across 400 years, closer to Shakespeare. Continued...