Theatre lovers will get to experience the bard in the way it was originally intended when the Pop-Up Globe Theatre comes to Crown.
This recreation of Shakespeare’s theatre from Elizabethan London has been stunning audiences around the world and giving them a not-to-be-missed theatrical experience.
OUTinPerth sat down with Executive Producer Tobias Grant who talked us through the process of recreating the iconic 17th century theatre.
“First of all one has to dedicate a lot of time and energy, because it’s not easy, this thing is one of the most ambitious touring properties that we’re aware of.” Grant said.
“The design is based on some research that was done by a team from the University of Sydney, we worked with that team on the dimensions and worked out how to create a scaffold design. This has 16,000 pieces of scaffold in it, it’s a 230 tonne building, it’s not that easy to move around.”
Despite being called a pop-up theatre, the construction is a big undertaking, Grant says it feels very special when the theatre appears in a new location.
The original theatre in London which was home to many of Shakespeare’s plays first performances was built in 1599 but burned down in 1613. A year later the second Globe theatre was built and operated until 1642, a few years later the theatre was pulled down to make way for tenements.
Despite being one of the most famous theatres in history, there is some conjecture about the dimensions of the theatre. Grant and his team worked off research which suggests the building was around 27 metres wide, making it even more intimate than Shakespeare’s Globe, the recreation that currently stands on the south bank of The Thames.
“It is more intimate, some people have described it as a stadium experience, or a mosh-pit experience, especially if your standing in front of the stage.”
In Shakespeare’s day the best seats in the house were on the first level directly opposite the stage, the cheapest seats were on the floor of the theatre, the riff-raff referred to as groundlings. Grant shares that seeing a production from the floor is a great experience, but so is sitting in the seats, and many people visit more than once to have different experiences.
“Quite a lot of the time people will come to our shows and but the traditional best seats in the house, middle gallery, middle row, looking straight at the stage – and they’ll wonderfully enjoy the experience, and then they’ll come back and sit somewhere else.” Grant said.
While being in the pit is appealing, Grant also suggested people consider the seats closest to the stage, because not only do you get to be up close to the action, you also look back on the audience too. Like in Shakespeare’s time, the house lights don’t dim and the audience is visible to the performers.
“You can be surrounded by those 500 people in the lower section and the groundling area, and see all their faces and expressions as they are covered in blood from a fight.”
There is only one historical image of The Globe, artist Wenceslas Hollar captured the theatre in a cityscape he drew of London. The image gave historians a good idea of where the theatre was located, and in the late 90’s some of its foundations were found in a car park. The majority of its foundations however are underneath Anchor Terrace near the Southwark Bridge – as it’s a heritage listed building further archaeology has not been possible.
While a lot of the history of The Globe is shrouded in mystery, the team are still trying to work out how they created some of their sound and visual effects using Jacobean technology, a lot is known about what went into the theatre from the records of accountants.
“We know a lot about the operation of this theatre, we have its accounting records to work from, we know what its props were, we know which scripts they had, we know who the members of the company were, what there shareholdings were, and how they changed over time.” Grant said.
The idea to create a pop-up Globe theatre went from an idea to reality very quickly. The idea came from the company’s artistic director Dr Miles Gregory, who was a school friend of Grants. Gregory dreamed of creating a festival of Shakespeare to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.
Gregory shared his idea with Grant when the two old friends caught up after decades of living on opposite sides of the world, the challenge was – the anniversary was only 15 months away.
“He said I’ve got this idea, I want to build the world’s first full scale temporary working replica of Shakespeare’s theatre, the second Globe. I want to fill it with a festival of his masterworks, and I want to perform it for the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in April 2016.”
Since its debut in Auckland, the Pop-Up Globe has had trips to Melbourne and Sydney and has sold over 550,000 tickets in three years.
While Shakespeare’s theatre could accept up to 3,000 people in a single evening, the Pop-Up Globe comfortably takes an audience of 950 attendees for each show.
The Pop-up Globe will open its doors at Crown Perth from 5th October with performance of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and Twelfth Night. Tickets are available from popupglobe.com.au
Graeme WatsonÂ
