{"id":1376,"date":"2016-10-26T01:17:58","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T00:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1376"},"modified":"2016-10-26T07:46:07","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T06:46:07","slug":"great-job-youre-fired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2016\/10\/great-job-youre-fired.html","title":{"rendered":"Great job. You\u2019re fired"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"globe-dream\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shakespeare\u2019s Globe yesterday released a baffling public statement<\/a>. It praised Emma Rice, its new artistic director, for the creative, critical and commercial success of her first season, her achievement in attracting new, diverse audiences. And then it sacked her. Rice will lead one more season, and then she goes \u2013 taking, the open-air theatre has decreed, her \u2018designed sound and light rigging\u2019 with her.<\/p>\n

Yes, Rice has brought assertive light and sound to her season \u2013 also, a political edge, a sharper sense of colour-blind and gender-disruptive casting. It\u2019s hard not to credit that these qualities have also disturbed some among the Globe\u2019s council and existing audiences. Another nasty woman is pushed aside.<\/p>\n

The Globe\u2019s programming, we\u2019re told, \u2018should be structured around \u201cshared light\u201d productions\u2019, to \u2018explore the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked.\u2019 We\u2019re back, dismayingly, to assessing theatre on the grounds of authenticity \u2013 the least useful, least lucid marker for theatrical value. Authentic early-modern staging, in the 21st century? When artists and audiences alike bring their contemporary selves to the performance, in the middle of contemporary London and its thrusting city skyline? That\u2019s an authentic impossibility.<\/p>\n

The Globe\u2019s prime function is surely to make a case for the power of these texts and the stories they can tell. In this, Rice has succeeded big time. Her own production of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> was the deserved headline hit of the season \u2013 bold, irreverent, entertaining, and with an unusual emotionally generous sense of relationship. Matthew Dunster\u2019s Cymbeline<\/em> (renamed Imogen<\/em> after its heroine) may have been the gangsta reboot that broke the council\u2019s resolve \u2013 but though it scythed back \u2018Fear no more the heat o\u2019 the sun\u2019 and had the cast bursting with joy to Skepta<\/a>, it also told the story with unusual verve and clarity. It wasn\u2019t romantic, but it was a bloody good thriller.<\/p>\n

Macbeth<\/em> didn\u2019t work \u2013 but it\u2019s a play that too rarely does. The most radical argument with the source text was also the genuine revelation of the season \u2013 Caroline Byrne\u2019s The Taming of the Shrew<\/em>, which (as I wrote here<\/a>), took that unlovely so-called comedy by the scruff of its misogynistic neck and shook it till it snarled. Gender and class had the charm scraped off them, and revealed a tough, horrible, fascinating play about lack of choice in a bottom-line world. It will be difficult to think of the play in future without factoring in its findings \u2013 and few Shakespeare productions can lay claim to that.<\/p>\n

Save us from shouting<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Matt Trueman<\/a> argues, this decision has to be about more than lighting. The Globe has always lit its evening performances (and I\u2019ve always enjoyed these far more than those blanched by the afternoon\u2019s glare and confusion). Adding neon \u2013 even the cheery \u2018Rock the ground\u2019 that greeted Dreamers this season \u2013 doesn\u2019t guarantee radicalism. But productions which grasp for original practices must work hard to resist a retrograde bias. All-male productions have often been good on male power games but dismaying when treating gender (I don\u2019t miss Propellor\u2019s screeching travesty heroines). When women play men (Michelle Terry\u2019s Henry V, Harriet Walter\u2019s Prospero, the women playing servants in Byrne\u2019s Shrew),<\/em> they take things far more seriously. Save us from a return to the Globe\u2019s shouty first seasons, horribly coarse and musky.<\/p>\n

The statement by CEO Neil Constable suggests the Globe reconstruction was a ‘radical experiment’ and that a change of direction will enable it ‘to optimise further experimentation in our unique theatre spaces and the playing conditions which they offer.’ The candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, its indoor space, has certainly been transformative\u00a0for thinking anew about Jacobean drama, its strange and shivery intensities.\u00a0Scholars will have their say, but the large outdoor theatre to me represents an\u00a0experiment beyond historical inquiry – an experiment into popular theatre, an oxymoron no more. Successive seasons have learned how to make the groundlings standing in front of the stage its beating heart – building a gaggle\u00a0of bardheads, tourists, students and newbies into a\u00a0play’s vigorously responsive sounding board. If being there sometimes\u00a0felt like confected panto in the early years, we now test, embrace, argue back against the productions. They have become more supple, more sophisticated and more fun with each passing season, and Rice’s season drove that dynamic forward.<\/p>\n

The Globe often attracts mixed reviews \u2013 the balance between fusty and populist, crude and timid is likely to be more keenly contested than in most theatres \u2013 but Rice\u2019s productions weren\u2019t the first to push far beyond original practice. Vanessa Redgrave played\u00a0Prospero; Mike Alfreds\u2019 small cast productions (of, yes, Dream<\/em> and Cymbeline)<\/em> brought the ethos of specific storytelling in an abstract setting that he\u2019d developed with Shared Experience. The stage was thrust into the yard, the marble-patterned pillars covered up. The Globe to Globe season featured a gamut of international companies taking a gamut of inauthentic approaches to the canon.<\/p>\n

Tom Cornford<\/a> has argued forcefully that the criticism of Rice was primarily misogynist. I\u2019m not wholly convinced \u2013 but have no doubt that what seemed admirably maverick in the theatre\u2019s previous male leaders (Dominic Dromgoole, an enthusiastic controversialist; Mark Rylance, sweetly wittering about ley lines and denying Shakespeare\u2019s authorship) can still seem beyond the pale for a woman. Rice\u2019s initial remarks about finding Shakespeare baffling and alienating did her few favours, and may have left the Globe\u2019s existing audiences behind \u2013 but would they have seemed more charming in a bloke?<\/p>\n

That Rice still feels able to programme a \u2018Summer of Love<\/a>\u2019 next year shows admirable optimism and resilience. If Shakespeare productions are once again the ground on which to contest what theatre is for \u2013 a backward-looking diversion or an engagement with the world, or as Cornford argues, ‘a culture war by the privileged against those they want to keep out’ \u2013 then the Globe\u2019s decision is authentically dismaying.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shakespeare\u2019s Globe yesterday released a baffling public statement. It praised Emma Rice, its new artistic director, for the creative, critical and commercial success of her first season, her achievement in attracting new, diverse audiences. And then it sacked her. Rice will lead one more season, and then she goes \u2013 taking, the open-air theatre has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[68],"class_list":{"0":"post-1376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-shakespeares-globe","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1380,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions\/1380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}