Globe Education Online

Love's Labour's Lost (2009)

In this podcast, Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole talks with Professor Peter Litchenfels about the 2009 tour of Love's Labour's Lost to the United States and his future plans for Shakespeare's Globe.

This interview was recorded at the Mondavi Center at U.C. Davis in California.

Time: 23mins 14secs

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Transcript of podcast

Professor Peter Lichtenfels, U.C. Davis:

My name’s Peter Lichtenfels and I’m a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance. I thought I’d maybe start with a couple questions but what’s more interesting for me is that if people have questions from the auditorium. We’re an intimate group so we can just raise our hands and talk. So let me start the conversation for a couple, and then we’ll invite questions from the audience. One of the things I’m interested in is that people have a good knowledge of the Globe, and they have a sense of the Globe; many people have been there, some people haven’t, and you’re the second artistic director of the Globe, so I was just wondering about how the artistic direction has grown since Mark Rylance, the first artistic director stepped down and you took over about four years ago.

Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director, Shakespeare’s Globe:

To a certain extent it’s continuity and carrying on what Mark [Rylance, previous Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe] did. Mark had a much more difficult job than me which was to start the Globe and birth it and he did it rather spectacularly. He did it spectacularly in terms of it being a commercial success, and people coming. But also the great thing about Mark is that he is very bold, and he was very experimental, and I think there was an expectation when the Globe began that it was going to play safe, and that it was going to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream every year, a single production that would repeat over and over again, or that it would just do a sort of “heritage Shakespeare” without taking any bold risks, and Mark was a very experimental spirit. He did Cymbeline with six people wearing pyjamas; he did a very extraordinary Tempest, as his final production, which was just three people with Mark playing a huge amount of the parts himself.

But it was something about that spirit of boldness and experiment that drew me to the Globe, and we just tried to carry on that ambition and that excitement and extend it. There are certain things we’re doing that are new: we do a lot of new plays now to go with the Shakespeare. I come from a new play background and one of the things that excited me about the Globe was that they do Shakespeare as if it’s a new play. We don’t do Shakespeare as if it’s been produced for 400 years and we’re just adding to the weight of production that’s accumulated over 400 years, we do Shakespeare as if it’s fresh in your hands and the script was just delivered by Shakespeare and you look at it and say ‘God, King Lear, this is quite good – let’s put it on!’ And to make that clearer and maintain that energy and foster more of that energy we do New Writing now together with the Shakespeare. We just did a huge play about Tom Paine [A New World], who many of you will know about, and about the two great chapters of his life, one in the American Revolution and the other in the French Revolution. We’ve done new plays by Howard Brenton, one called In Extremis, which I think was work-shopped at an early stage here a long time ago. And that’s been great, and that’s added a certain flavour to the organisation and a certain element of excitement to people who don’t know what we’re doing.

We also do a lot of touring now, we do a lot of small scale touring. 400 years ago Shakespeare’s company loved to tour, they presented plays at the Globe, but they also travelled around the country and around Europe doing shorter and swifter versions of the same plays and I wanted to revive that tradition because I love touring, and I love being in a theatre that feeds into the community and returns to the community in some way, so we now do two small scale tours a year that travel all over the UK and all around Europe.

What else has changed? The nature of the place has changed because Mark is different from me; Mark is a beautiful actor, he’s one of the greatest actors we have in England, but he’s a very ethereal, imaginative, flighty spirit and … I’ve got a bigger belly, and I’m more earthed and more rooted, and so just by the nature of our characters the atmosphere of the whole place has changed slightly. We also do more work now, this year we had 7 companies doing 9 productions, we employed about 120 actors, so we’re now a very sizable operation, probably the equivalent of the National and a bit bigger than the RSC and so we’re presenting more work and probably a wider range of work.

PL:

Would you care to say how much subsidy the National gets from the government and the RSC and you?

DD:

The National gets £19 million a year; the RSC gets £1 6million a year; we get zero. We get absolutely nothing.

PL:

I was going to say I think that Dominic is being modest when he said that Mark as the first Artistic director had the hard time, I think that he did probably, and he had to establish it, but you also get visibility, and I think it’s always hard to be the second artistic director, because you’re totally compared to the first guy all the time.

DD:

I think the hardest time will be for the third person that comes in, because what we’re doing is we’re working our way through the canon. Mark presented (I think) 21 of the plays of Shakespeare in his time there. And there’s some particular excitement about presenting a Shakespeare play for the first time in the new Globe that you can’t capture with a revival, because there’s something about the architecture, and there’s something about the audience and the nature of the interaction with the audience which throws an incredible spotlight on Shakespeare’s plays, and means that any time you do it, whatever it is, for the first time in the New Globe it’s just like a waterfall of revelations and insights about how Shakespeare wrote, why he wrote, what the mechanics of the staging were. And I’m now working through the rest of the canon, and probably by the time I leave there’ll only be about two or three plays left, so the next person in is going to have to spend a lot of time reviving plays or doing plays for the second time at the New Globe and that’ll be a different sort of test, but an interesting test.

PL:

One of the things that I find extraordinary, because I’ve seen at least some plays every year, is that it totally and radically changed my perception of how you do a Shakespeare play. Since coming to the Globe I’ve never been back to the RSC, and that’s not to say the RSC doesn’t do it well, it’s just that I don’t want to see Shakespeare in that setting. I mean, before I ever went, my first reaction was ‘Oh, I’m going to a version of Disneyland, dedicated to Shakespeare’, but as soon as I went, you could see that it was a real working theatre. I don’t think there’s a theatre in London that has better acoustics than the Globe. The Globe itself is a character (at least that’s my feeling) and the audience are a character, and both of those always contribute to the Shakespeare play on stage; so if there’s a soliloquy by a person, well, that soliloquy’s among 500 groundlings, on the stage and the building. Which brings me to your Love’s Labour’s Lost which you conceived for the Globe stage, but yet you’re touring it to many different kinds of stages in the United States, many are pros arch and this is an adapted proscenium arch theatre, so how did you re-imagine the production from the Globe, or what was your thinking in preparing for this tour?

DD:

You obviously have to make massive adjustments, because you’re in a totally different environment, most obviously because there’s a roof up there, and there’s no roof at the Globe, and we have birds flying in and disporting themselves over the stage, and you don’t have that here (or I hope not anyway!) But you have to try and not make too many adjustments, and you have to try and recapture that Globe spirit and that Globe flavour in a different environment. So in as many ways as we can we try and make it like the Globe; we keep the house lights up throughout the shows, so the audience is aware of the audience. Because that’s the biggest thing about the Globe – that the audience get excited by congregating together, they get excited by being together, which is what theatre always used to be like, and what used to be the purpose of theatre, so instead of being plunged into darkness and solitude the moment a play begins, you’re always aware that you’re in a group and that you’re in a community. So we try and replicate that by keeping the houselights up; we move a lot around the auditorium, we use these entrances here and we use all of your vomitoriums here; we’ll have music out in the foyer before the show; it’s anything we can do to try and break the barrier between the stage and the audience so that it doesn’t become an evening that’s dominated by a group of people in the light talking to a group of people in the darkness. The idea is that we all share together in imagining the world of the play.

With Love’s Labour’s Lost it was key to me that it’s a wonderful play and it’s a very generous play, it’s very generous with its language, it’s a whole feast of language and different voices that come through the play, and it’s something about that act of generosity that keeps it interesting, and it was very important to me that with that language, some of it very difficult, that it’s shared amongst the whole group and that everyone together tries to understand it. They try to understand the sexual innuendos, they try to understand the high wit, they try to understand some of the denser prose – it’s a communal thing because it can very quickly, in a traditional auditorium, Love’s Labour’s Lost, become a play about clever people being clever in isolation and away from the audience, and then it can become very irritating very quickly. So we try and make all of that language a shared thing and a generous thing, and we try and replicate that wherever we are including very very beautiful theatres like this one… which is very beautiful, but it is rather big. You could put about 6 Globes in here!

[Interviewer invites the audience to ask questions]

PL:

It’s a question about the wordplay and how did it work out so that everybody understands the joke.

DD:

It’s a mode of communication as far as possible, which is what the Globe’s about, which is that you do try as much as possible to look out and look at people so that when you’re speaking instead of doing that and looking into light and divorcing yourself from the group, you’re doing that, or looking at people up there, but you are engaging with people, and then the language becomes something that’s communal, as I say, but you also just and encourage an air of mischief in the audience as well as on stage, so that they’re on the lookout for the joke and they’re on the lookout for the pun, or they’re on the lookout for the obscenity or whatever, and then if you can get an audience like that it’s great because then… one of the reasons we love the theatre is that, or I love the theatre, is that I’m more intelligent in an intelligent group who are all together trying to work something out, than I am on my own, sitting at home watching the telly. One of the reasons I love the theatre is that enhanced intelligence that you get, so we just try and foster that spirit as far as possible.

PL:

So the question is, how does the Globe compare to say, philosophically and in spirit, in comparison to the Globe in San Diego, and the Globe in Ashland?

DD:

I don’t know them. I’ve met the people from San Diego, and I’ve met the people from Ashland, I went to a fantastic organisation called STAA which is the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America, and they meet regularly once a year, and I was there two and a half years ago in Nashville for their gathering, and it was thrilling to me to see the breadth and variety and range of organisations that focus on Shakespeare in America, and just the sheer appetite and enthusiasm for Shakespeare, but I don’t know what those specific ones are like. What I think is great is that people are taking on more and more that sort of theatre architecture. I know that traditionally there’ve been many open air Shakespeare festivals in America, but now I know they’re trying to build a Rose in Massachusetts, they’re trying to build a new replica of the Globe in Dallas, they’re trying to build a new one in Virginia, there’s a mobile one being built in Australia, there are several being built in Germany, and I think that is one of the great tonic things about the Globe is that instead of being a trip to the past when it opened, it became a pointer to the future, and people realised that actually that way of appreciating theatre is more fun and more exhilarating than in a darkened room that’s based in the old Victorian proscenium model. So I’m glad that they’re there, but I don’t know those specific ones.

We’re right next to the Tate Modern, we’re on the Thames, we’re about 200 yards from where the real Globe was, and about 100 yards from where the Rose was, we do a tremendous amount of shows per week. We play seasonally, we play late April through to early October, and we keep a number of companies on the go through the summer, so that we’re able to do 13 performances a week. Monday afternoon is the only afternoon that we have off and we play the shows in the evening at 7:30pm and the matinees at 2:00pm. And we’re very lucky because at the moment, touch wood, we’re playing to an inexhaustible appetite for Shakespeare and the Globe, and long may that continue.

PL:

And you’re also doing a panto.

DD:

Oh yeah, we’re doing a Christmas show this year, which is the first time we’ve ever done that, and heaven knows what that will be like because there’ll be rain, and there’ll be cold, yeah. It’s going to be short. It’s going to be very short, it’s going to have a long interval.

PL:

So, how long has the tour been so far, and are you pleased with the reception?

DD:

We’ve had a terrific time. So far we’ve played a week at Ann Arbour, a week in Philadelphia and a week in Berkley, we’re here, we’re going to Santa Barbara, we’re going to Santa Monica, then we’re going to cross back to Massachusetts for a week and then we’ve got two and a half weeks in New York.

We’ve had a terrific time, we’ve had a great reception, a great response; I think it’s genuinely surprising to lots of people, and I think some people have been slightly troubled by it, because it’s not ... it’s not posh, and we don’t aim to be posh, and we’ve never aimed to be posh, and the sort of atmosphere that we’ve created at the Globe isn’t, and I think some people expect everyone to have accents like mine, which is very BBC or very RP, and everyone to be very still, and everyone to be very deliberate in their delivery, and it’s a lot freer than that, I think that sort of surprises some people. And it’s rude, and it’s meant to be rude, it’s a rude play and it’s got a rude energy, but that surprises some people. But we’ve had a terrific response, and we love coming here, we’re having the best time.

It’s very hard, every town we come to, the company fall horrendously in love with and so they don’t want to go, and then they on somewhere new and they fall in love anew. But I think it’s going to be very hard to get them out of the United States at the end of the trip.

PL:

How does Dominic choose the plays?

DD:

It’s part of the impulse that we are working through the canon, so each year there are sort of plums that we haven’t done before. This year we hadn’t done Troilus and Cressida before, we did that; when we played Love’s Labour’s Lost there a couple of years ago, 2007, that was the first time we’d done that. We try and put a season together that has some sort of coherence and some sort of pattern and some sort of title, although it can be a very broad title. But apart from that, it’s purely at my whim.

PL:

I heard Dominic speak a bit yesterday somewhere else and you were speaking about being artistic director of the Globe, and that he sits down, and he chooses the plays. I think when you go to the Globe you see the spirit of who Dominic is now, and you see that spirit replicated on the stage in the Globe, and he’s also written a wonderful book called Will and Me, and that spirit is yet replicated again in that book. It’s a good read, so if you go onto Amazon, give it to somebody for Christmas. He didn’t ask me to say that, by the way!

DD:

No, it’s a big surprise and I’m very grateful for it. It is my spirit, but it’s not quite as scruffy as I am, on the stage.

[Question about the possibility of rebuilding the Blackfriars indoor theatre]

DD:

Oh yes please, we’d love to do that, that’s our next burning ambition, and that’s what I’d love to try and get done before I leave. When they built the Globe they built the whole centre, and it includes a great big exhibition space downstairs, a bar/restaurant, events spaces, big space for education, but they also built the shell for an indoor Jacobean theatre. They built it based on designs that were by a man called Webb, who was an apprentice to Inigo Jones, the great designer and the great theatre designer. And he did these designs in 1660 for what we think is his idea of an ideal theatre based on the proportions of the Blackfriars (although the shape of the building is not the same as the Blackfriars). So when they built the Globe centre they built this shell, and they built it all out in perfectly authentic brick, they recreated the means by which they made those bricks and put it up there.

And so it sat there for 12 years as a rebuke to the whole organisation. It’s used a lot for education workshops and for rehearsals, but it’s sat there as a rebuke to all of us, asking us to get a move on and fill out the interior, but what we need is a further £6 million to fill that out and when we can do it, we’ll put in a timber frame oak construction inside and we’ll do winter playing, which is what we’ve always wanted to do, be able to play throughout the year. And we will have a Blackfriars. And also happily over the last 12 years a lot of fresh information has come through about what the Blackfriars might have looked like, so it can be a more detailed idea of that theatre than we had probably 12 years ago, and it will be a delight.

I mean the great thing about the Globe was that it was a surprise. People thought they knew what it was, but actually when it opened it surprised them massively about what the nature of that theatrical interaction was, and I think that when we build the Blackfriars, if we build it as scrupulously and as academically faithfully as we can, again it will be a very big surprise to people about exactly what that sort of interior theatre was.

The most startling thing about it is that as far as we know is that the audience in the stalls sat in long ellipses, like that, and then another one like that, and another one like that and another one like that, so that basically they were looking at each other. So they weren’t looking at the stage, they came to sit and look at each other, and then hear the play, because they spoke a lot in Elizabethan times and Jacobean times about hearing a play, rather than watching a play. But again, they didn’t come to have a play dictated to them, they came to be excited about each other and to get off on each other, and the play came out and shared in that excitement. So it would be great if we could replicate something as extraordinary as the Globe.

PL:

Does the Globe always do classical versions of the play, or does it sometimes contemporise the Shakespeare play?

DD:

We try to be quite free, and we try to be quite freely anachronistic and not too stuck in any period. But the most odd and important thing to realise about the Globe is that it’s an intensely modern experience going there because the biggest part of the room is people, and you can see all those people, and you can see them all and they’re all there dressed like this and dressed like we all are tonight, and they’re there with their iPhones and their iPods, and their heads are full of the credit crunch and Obama and whatever. And so that is two thirds of the room is 1,500 people, and they are modern. I mean, they have to be modern, because that’s how they carry themselves, how they dress, whatever. So the room is already a modern experience, so often it feels slightly redundant to come on with guns, or with combat trousers on or with tanks and say ‘See, see the modernity of this play’, when already you’re within a very modern experience. And so often it’s more interesting to set up some sort of interaction between that modernity which is the audience who are very, very present, and the play, which is from a different time, so that you’ve got more of a dialogue between the Renaissance and the modern age.

PL:

And also you’re in the open air. I remember seeing a production of The Merchant of Venice; I think Bassanio or Portia fall in love with each other, and one of them says to each other ‘Let’s celebrate the concord of our joy’, and at that moment Concorde went over! So it totally keeps you in the modern as well as seeing something in the... One last question: do you care to answer about authorship?

DD:

That’s a tricky one for the last question! I’m absolutely straight down the line Stratfordian. But Mark is not. Mark is the patron of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, and he holds a very interesting collection of lectures each year with people proposing a collection of sane and interesting possibilities (and insane and weird possibilities) and I’m happy for the debate to take place. There are certain organisations that exclude that debate and think that it shouldn’t happen. I’m happy for it to take place but no amount of lectures or reading has ever convinced me of anything other than the fact that it was written by a Stratfordian.

PL:

I’d like to thank Dominic and I hope you the enjoy the show tonight. I’m looking forward to it.

DD:

Thank you.