Shakespeare's Globe

A pop-up Wooden O – well, a cross-section of two thirds of a cardboard O – ought to be welcomed, especially when the paper engineer is the much respected Juan Wijngaard. Sadly, this production seems more ornament than working model, despite the invitation to ‘Come and play in our theatre’.

The Victorians took their Toy Theatres seriously, down to flaring footlights and the vivid actions of melodramas such as The Miller and His Men, which Dickens loved to stage. Devotees took pride in making their own theatres and painting the ‘Penny Plain’ sheets of characters, scorning the ‘Tuppence Coloured’ ready-made cut-outs (though even those had then to pasted onto your own card). Wijngaard’s Globe rises complete, in all its intricacy, from the opening page; though mine refused to lie down and after a few openings the roof over the stage looks decidedly leaky. It is all somehow ‘instant’ compared with the theatres and plays a Victorian child must have felt they owned after all the work they put in.

Here, as script, we are provided with two copies of famous extracts from Shakespeare – such as the lengthy ‘Now is the winter…’ opening soliloquy, the balcony scene from R & J, and the witches from Macbeth; though playing out the stage direction ‘dancing in a ring’ with three figures on one slide operated through a tiny aperture in the side of the theatre would take some ingenuity. Just how and why would children engage with this? And would they really invite an audience to listen to them reciting 30 or 40 lines, out of context, while one or two 1.5 inch high figures stand frozen on the tiny, rather dark stage (4.5” x 2.5”). The figures of the players are there to be punched out on the end of thin card ‘slides’. The Victorians went in for structures often 3 feet across and used durable slides of wood or metal for repeated use.

There is also an illustrated booklet about the Globe in which Richard Burbage invites you to take what is promised to be ‘the tour of a lifetime’. The text is informative (with side trips to the bear baiting, references to Marlowe and even to Shakespeare’s birthday); but, as any text book writer learns, it is very difficult to address an unknown reader convincingly when you are trying to get information across: ‘My friends call me Burbage, so I hope you will too, as I would like us to be friends.’ In an age where communication is so immediate, it would take a child already eager to learn for a full engagement with this production.