Birthday Bash with OAE

 

I used to have a birthday party every ten years. My fortieth was in Sydney, with the fiftieth at a half-built Shakespeare’s Globe in London (Endymion playing Mozart and Krommer), and since then they have been held in our village on the Northamptonshire-Oxfordshire border, King’s Sutton.

 

But, as time seems to be truncating (see welcome guest Julian Barbour’s The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics), I’ve been having one every five years.

 

This time around, we were lucky enough to get the Soloists of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment playing Schubert (the Trout Quintet and his earlier Adagio and Rondo Concertante in F), plus Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat minor. This last was the great discovery for many.

 

The church was filled with an appreciative audience, its acoustic near perfect, our 1870 Broadwood piano well-tuned, the players – a mix of wonderful old friends and brilliant young ones – in top form, with virtuoso double-bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku (above) at her most animated.

 

All this followed by a convivial tea party in the garden at home with family and friends – efficient waitress-service provided by daughter Dora and BFFs. Deep joy all round.

 

Comedy or tragedy at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse?

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is by no means a barrel of laughs. Manipulation and mayhem, torture and murder are the substance of the thing. So having the audience laugh (heartily? nervously? both?) at the final slayings of four major characters came as something of a surprise – just as it did when I last saw the play several decades ago. Did they laugh at the Blackfriars Theatre in 1612-13, when it was first performed there? I think it’s entirely possible. Even in an era when life was cheap, it still must have seemed rather ridiculous.

The Duchess of Malfi is the opening production at the newly-finished Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe. It was always part of architect Theo Crosby’s conception – an indoor playhouse based on the earliest surviving design for a theatre in Britain.

 

Initially it was called the Inigo Jones, that great English architect of the early seventeenth century being thought to be its author. When this was felt to be unlikely, it was described more loosely as the Jacobean Theatre. Then the academic advisors to the Globe decided that it was probably designed well after the death of James I, more correctly from the reign of Charles II. The consensus now seems to be that it was created by Inigo Jones’s pupil and follower, John Webb.

Over the past twenty years it has stood there empty, used primarily for rehearsal and educational projects. Now it’s fully kitted out, candlelit, the audience hugger-mugger, a small space for intimate performance. Quite unique.     

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.

Next to Bad Boy at Shakespeare’s Globe

Walking in the sun along the South Bank of the Thames yesterday, I dropped into Shakespeare’s Globe.

I’m right next to the Bad Boy Pulled Pork stall. That’s the flagstone with my name on it. Nearby are Ben Kingsley, Paul Eddington, a “William Shakespeare” and “Japan”.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was World President of the International Advertising Association (and a director of the Globe), I was able to persuade lots of media owners around the world to donate space so that we could advertise the personalised flagstones for sale.

If I remember correctly, they were £500 a pop, and we were able to raise many tens of thousands towards the building of the theatre.

Have you been yet? It’s a very special experience. And tickets for groundlings (best place in the house) are still just £5.   

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/