Vacation 13: The Globe Theatre

An excellent scale model.

Tuesday. Today's itinerary was short: tour St. Paul's cathedral, tour Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and see a performance of Othello, and do a bit of shopping at Piccadilly Circus. We did pretty much only those things, and yet it took the whole day to do it.



We caught the train away from our hotel about 9:30 or so, and rode to St. Paul's Cathedral, where Susan again opted to sit and wait for me, and I grudgingly coughed up another 10 pounds for a visit (by Susan's rough calculation, the gawkers like me must add up to half a million pounds or more each day in revenue). The church is absolutely immense inside, almost absurdly so. The basic structure is as big or bigger than any cathedral in Paris--indeed, any I've been in before (including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, which bills itself as the largest gothic cathedral in the world), and the conventional cathedral space is augmented here in the middle by a dome so immense and so high as to defy belief. St. John the Divine may be bigger in footprint, but I bet St. Paul's trumps it in interior volume (the ultimate rich xian pissing contest!). I decided to do the walk up to the catwalk around the perimeter of the base of the dome (really only about halfway up), and there were something 250 steps to get up and as many to get back down, all ancient, stone spiral stairs. A proliferation of warning signs at the entrance to this part of the exhibit warns that the stairs are narrow and there are no places to rest and no way to turn back, etc., etc. Even so, the line was several times slowed by someone who just had to stop and catch their breath. Once up top, the view was vertiginous, with the floor so far below you that people appeared tiny, and yet the dome rising as far above you. Thankfully, there was a strong railing.

Blurry. Sorry, but my hands must have been shaking from the fear of The Gods instilled in me by the Nazi N0-Camera catamite.

You can barely see it in this pic, but we're up quite high here--yet only half way to the top of the dome.

I felt rather testy that both this place and Westminster Abbey would not allow photography, in spite of giving Ye Olde Royale Fleecing to let you in. I understand that it would detract from worship, but the place is closed to paying tourists on worship days, so let it ride. I took a couple anyway in protest, but they were quite militant about it and there were limits to how cheeky I felt I could be. There's quite a bit of ceremonial gobbledygook here as well, though not nearly what there is in Westminster (admittedly St. Paul's is much younger). And St. Paul's has a bona fide crypt, so only the very special are allowed to take up real estate up top. I have several recordings of the organs in St. Paul, including a complete Duruflé by organist John Scott. But the organ is not much to my liking. Still, the space into which it must speak is really immense, and I'll have to give them another listen when I get home. I can't help noting that the whole church thing rather grates on me without music, and the body of work that sprung from the spaces and instruments in Paris get them an automatic lifetime pass of peevish cynicism; once in England, among organs I don't care much for, my enthusiasm is harder to sustain.

The pedestrian-only Millennium Bridge.

After my hour in St. Paul's, we made our way over to the architecturally-fabulous pedestrian-only Millennium Bridge and crossed to the South Bank. I said yesterday that there was nothing here in London quite on par with Paris's pathways along the Seine, and I can see now that this statement is only partly correct. The South Bank is much closer to the river treatment one sees in Paris than the North Bank is. There are plenty of attractions on both sides of the Thames, but the South side is newer and has a more pedestrian-friendly riverbank. We crossed the Millennium bridge and took a fascinating and very informative tour of the Globe Theatre, a replica of the building Shakespeare is said to have used.

Theatre Girl in front of the Globe.

The original Globe was built in 1599 (about two blocks from this one, but the site is currently in use) and existed until a fire in 1613, and then a nearly exact replica was up from 1614 to 1642, when the Puritans closed it and destroyed it, along with all the other theatres in London. In constructing this new copy, which opened in 1997, they used period materials and constructions techniques as much as possible, and the theatre is of the same size and specification as the original Globe (so far as their very extensive research has made possible--and the more they learn, the more they alter the place to be in harmony with their research) It seats 1,500 people, five hundred standees (called "groundlings" by Shakespeare) and about 1,000 in the seats. The theatre itself is donut-shaped, with the center being open to the sky and thus, the groundlings are open to the elements. The seats, in three tiers, are under a thatched roof--which is, by the way, forbidden by law in London after the great fire of 1666 which destroyed so much of the city and after which St. Paul's was built as a centerpiece of reconstruction; a special dispensation was needed to allow the thatched roof today, and it is sprayed with a fire-retardant chemical and equipped with sprinklers all around just above it as a precaution. Getting further and further afield, I must note that the original Globe burned down in 1613 after a canon shot from one of the productions caught the thatched roof on fire, and the 1614 reconstruction used a tile roof instead; so why not put a tile roof on this one and save the trouble? The whole place is built of oak timbers, constructed with wooden dowels--some 9,000 of them--and feels very old. But the playing space is fantastic, and no one is very far from the action. The acoustics are great, and apart from the airplanes flying overhead (damned pilots) it was quite easy to hear.

Period construction. Over 9,000 wooden pegs were used.

After our tour, we caught a quick lunch at the theatre cafe, and then went in for the 2:pm performance of Othello. The show was great, and quite long--3 and 1/2 hours overall--and the experience of seeing theatre this way is hugely different from the Broadway experience we had last month in NYC. There are no lights and minimal staging, and everybody is packed right in with everybody else, so there's a real community sense to the experience (our guide reminded us that there would have been far more people in the original, with no fire regulations: they estimate double the number currently allowed. And given that people were not fastidious about bathing and that washing the clothes would ruin them--and given that there were no breaks and no toilets, and people were expected to relieve themselves on the straw thrown underfoot for that purpose--you can imagine what a pungent, animal experience it would have been). I wish I had read the show before I went to it, as it always takes me a while to click my mind into Shakespeare. It was easy enough to follow along with the major plot points, but the beauty and nuance of the language would go right past without rapt attention and even with it since I was still warming up. Still, we both enjoyed the performance very much. Music was supplied with a five-man band, playing period instruments either on the stage with the performance, or backstage. The music was not for mood, but showed up when there would have been music in real life. Given the oddity of the music to modern ears, it's just as well they weren't trying to ply my emotions by way of it; I might only have yearned to be elsewhere. We had good weather to start, and then things turned dark and, right at the climax of the play, it began to rain, a sprinkle at first and then quite a downpour. Authenticity at its best. The poor college kids with their five pound entries scrambled to put up umbrellas or put on rain coats, while the rest of the crowd tried to shush the commotion. Othello had just killed Desdimona, after all! After a few minutes, it subsided, but it was fascinating to see how it distracted things. Thinking back 400 years, our guide said that many of the thousand groundlings would have showed up to see the royalty and their fancy clothes, who were seated on the stage, above the actors--where they couldn't have seen shit but where they could be well-seen--and that the top tier, where we were seated, was basically a recruiting area for local brothels, and you get a sense of what the chaos must have been like. Seeing great theatre must have been a bit of a challenge.

Groundlings filing in for the performance.

Love the thatched roof!

After this it was 5:30, and we walked across the river and, by way of the fabulous Covent Garden shopping area, over to Piccadilly Circus to look around, and thence up to High Holborne for dinner at a cafe, and then on to the hotel.