Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: walked

12 September 2001: The Globe Theatre

With papers and shock and going out to buy other papers--now in a box like my parents' papers in the garret from late 1963--we had a late start. The idea was to go to the Tate and then the Globe and then maybe the Tate again afterward.

Well.

We walked down Bloomsbury to Endell to Bow and Wellington Streets and crossed Lancaster Place to Waterloo Bridge, from which we had heard the best views of the city are to be had. It's not high, so I guess that's what the Millennium Eye is for, but you can see up and down the Thames from downstream of St. Paul's to upstream of Westminster. Then we walked down the Thames to the Globe, passing these super fishy streetlights along the way.

I noticed the falcons immediately on the brick building to the left of the theatre (which holds the Shakespeare's Globe Café, Restaurant, Coffee Shop, bookstore, and box office. Either people don't decorate with dogs as much as they do with birds or owning a bird has really turned my head. Toward any bird around. Anyway, in Shakespeare's day the neighboring pub was called the Falcon, hence the gargoyles. Also, you cannot quite make out the entwined initials forming a wrought-iron cypher in the middle of the balcony railing. They are S and W, for Sam Wanamaker (who started the effort to rebuild the Globe in 1947) and of course the man himself.

I have been looking for a book a tour guide said exists to explain the gates. We stood in front of them for the outdoor part of the tour, and I noticed all the little critters. A bull, a griffin, a trout, a swallow, a fly in a web, grapes, and a ram, praying mantis, poppy, iguana, goat, chameleon, ostrich, fox, heron, mouse and cheese, jack-in-the-pulpit, scorpion, mortar and pestle, fairy, mermaid, coyote (!), grapes, ant, palm tree, leave, shark, armadillo (!), baboon, frog, owl, and a dinosaur (!), and others, 36 altogether. I thought coyotes and armadillos were too American for Shakespeare to be familiar with, and when did anyone discover a dinosaur skull? Because of course my identifications couldn't be mistaken. Anyway, metalsmiths from all over the world were asked to make an image from one of the plays. A baboon is mentioned in Macbeth. The mortar and pestle could be Romeo and Juliet, and I should know which of these others belong to at least several of the plays. But I don't. Hence I asked a guide (after the play) if there was a book that explained it all. Yes, she said. I haven't found it yet.

The ceiling over the stage is painted with the zodiac and the seasons. It's not known for certain, but there's textual evidence in the plays to support the decoration. (The entire theatre is built as authentically as possible.) The columns and banisters are painted to look like marble. The wooden stage would not support marble and I don't suppose if the banisters were marble, the wooden railing could hold them in place. There's not a nail in the place, it's all built with wooden pegs. The organization got dispensation from the city of London--or Southwark, I should think--to build a thatched roof, none of which have been permitted since the Great Fire of 1686 or thereabouts. There's a sprinkler system in it, but disguised. The original Globe's walls were strengthened with cattle fur, but cattle aren't so furry nowadays, or if furry breeds exist they don't in sufficient quantities to provide enough hair. So the walls now have cashmere in them. In the archeological site, about 300 feet away, quantities of hazelnut shells were found, too many to be the debris of snacking playgoers. Were they for drainage? No one knows. But the reconstruction has them, to be as like the original as possible. All the foliage--the heather and whatever else--also isn't historically certain, but it's pretty, isn't it? (justified the guide) and is possible. It's all Scottish stuff in honor of the Celtic plays the Globe produced this season, Macbeth, King Lear, and Cymbeline.

Okay. This day has been my stumbling block. Suffice to say that during the 12:30 tour of the Globe, the guide said, "For those of you who're staying on this afternoon to see Macbeth..." and it turned out that I had got the day wrong. Instead of seeing Cymbeline Tuesday, we had spent the day in the British Museum. Seeing a play at the Globe was the one thing RDC really wanted to do in London, and he was really upset. As soon as the tour let up, I scurried for the box office.

Because people had an unclear understanding of "open air theatre," in its first season the Globe had to deal with a lot of cancellations and then said nope no more. So the clerk, very kind and understanding, couldn't refund my Tuesday tickets. But he did sell us two seats with in the upper gallery at the lowest possible price. So we pretended to be elderly blind college students and saw Macbeth.

Which was fabulous.

Everyone except the ladies Macbeth and Macduff wore tuxedos, except one of the weird sisters once. The weird sisters (two men and a woman) wore trick glasses, the sort that made you look drunk or spiral-eyed or otherwise spooky, and that was a good effect. Everyone had a chair, a stone, and a handkerchief; these were the only props. If you lost your stone, you were dead.

Lady Macbeth in particular was terrific, grasping--both clinging and ambitious--and had palpable sex appeal. Fleance was gorgeous.

Just as the play ended, the rain started in earnest, which was perfect timing on its part. It was well after 4:00 and we didn't go to the Tate, but home again. We tried the pub across from Savoir Faire and were cornered by the Cockney maintenance man at our hotel. He told us how he felt so helpless about the day before, and that a woman staying at the hotel had a brother who worked in WTC but she couldn't get through on the phone plus the television in her room didn't work so she couldn't even get news. He lent her his mobile and got her room changed. (Her brother was fine.) I pointed out that this kindness was not nothing and in doing it he wasn't helpless. He wasn't buying it.

Then we returned to Savoir Faire for supper. I had a baked avocado, there's a new concept, slathered in a cheese sauce with mushrooms. Delicious. Also not British.