Finding Shakespeare's brother

Arriving early for the Duchess of Malfi matinée at the Globe, I wandered slowly through Borough Market, bought fish and chips from a stall and consumed them, well rugged up, in the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral.

Still with time to spare, I decided to go in search of the flagstone commemorating Shakespeare’s actor brother, Edmund. And there he is, on the floor of the chancel, next door to two other stones, for the playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger – they wrote a dozen plays together in the early part of the seventeenth century (Fletcher two of the lesser known ones with Shakespeare). I was told by an attentive steward that WS had paid for his brother’s stone.

What a pity he didn’t pre-purchase one for himself at the same time. We’ll just have to make do with his gravestone at Stratford – the one that contains the dire warning that “Bleste be the man that spares thes stones, / And curst be he that moves my bones”.  

The last time that I was in that cathedral was in 1993 – for the memorial service for Sam Wanamaker, along with shoals of other Wanamaker-helpers from his 25 year campaign to rebuild the Globe. Sam is commemorated in the south aisle, appropriately right next to the nineteenth century Shakespeare memorial.

Do you suppose all those Bankside playwrights and actors ate fish and chips in the churchyard?

As You Don’t Like It

In the years leading up to the building of Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside in London, the great motor force behind the project, Sam Wanamaker, used regularly to declare that actors would have to learn again how to act in this new space.

With no sound amplification and no roof, the challenge at the Globe would be how to project to such a substantial amphitheatre without loss of naturalness and relationship.

In reflection, I think it’s a clue as to why I was disappointed in the recent production of As You Like It in the enclosed main house at Stratford. Although they were in close proximity to each other, so many of the actors simply shouted. 

I thought we’d left all that behind us.

The Real King Lear

I notice that Tom Stoppard has spoken recently of the late John Wood as “truly my favourite actor”.

I first saw him in the debut production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Old Vic in the 1960s. Then, brilliantly, in Travesties, which was written by Stoppard for him.

But for me he was the indelible Lear.

I had first seen King Lear as a teenager at school, directed by the extraordinary Gordon Braddy and starring David Allister (then David MacDonald). But I was far too immature to get it then (as I do so personally now).

So when I became involved with Sam Wanamaker and Shakespeare’s Globe, I made up for lost time, seeing a dozen or more different Lears in eighteen months, many of them our most celebrated actors. It was John Wood at the RSC in 1990 that seemed to me to be Lear.

He died aged 81 a year ago this month. A great actor, but no celeb.

Getting started at the Globe

It’s widely known that Sam Wanamaker dedicated most of his adult life to re-building Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London – and sadly died before it was completed.

Perhaps it is less well known that he drew into the project
shoals of individuals who could help him in one way or another to realise his dream. This became completely clear to me at his memorial service at Southwark Cathedral early in 1994.

I looked around and recognised people that I knew, who, to the best of my knowledge, had had nothing to do with the project. But we all had contributed in one way or another.

Sam always knew where and when he needed help. And he had the great gift of being able to inspire us all.

I came in to beef up the marketing and communications for the project – at a time when fund-raising had virtually dried up. It was not easy. And in fact that situation did not change until, in direct contravention of the board’s express wish, Sam started building.

“Now we’ve started, the money will come,” he told the board. And he was right.