A fine afternoon of theater

A couple of decades ago, an American actor named Sam Wanamaker got the idea in his head that on the unmarked site of Shakespeare’s long-disappeared theater beside the Thames River, the city would do well to erect a replica that could serve as a permanent home to the playwright’s legacy. Not everyone was so enthusiastic as Wanamaker, and it took several decades for the project to come to life. By the time the first play was staged in the new Globe Theater in 1997, Wanamaker had long since passed away, but because of his passion and persistence, London is now blessed with a venue authentic to every minute detail to the stage that Shakespeare originally wrote his plays for. On that muggy river-side site where such literary genius was put to stage and paper, the Globe emanates a multi-layered history – a contemporary construction mimicking an original Elizabethan edifice where a long-dead writer recounted legends of the Roman empire that had petered out a millennium earlier.

I had visited and taken a tour in mid-winter, when the skies are far too rainy and the air far too chilly to stage outdoor plays. I made a point of putting this on my list of things I must do before I leave London – and with the date of departure coming ever-nearer, I decided this sunny Saturday was as good a day as any to skip out on studying and go see a play.

The theatre is set out in the original style, with thatched roof over heavy wooden rafters, three tiers of stacked seats viewing the action from almost every angle possible, and an open floor plan where those who want something even cheaper than the cheap seats can pay £5 for a standing-only space that is close enough to the action that spatters of fake blood are a regular hazard. I know myself well enough to know that while £5 for an afternoon’s entertainment sounds like a great bargain, I can’t stand still for that long (especially after a week on my feet in the hospital wards) before I get cranky and just want it all to end. Instead, I bought the cheapest seated ticket (“restricted view,” the box office warns of these tickets) and installed myself on the top-most deck in a corner from where I found myself looking straight down onto the stage from a vertigo-inducing thirty or forty feet up.

I’d never read Titus Andronicus and had only heard that it is one of the “darker” works that Shakespeare ever wrote, which is of course a mild euphemism for the gore-soaked bloodbath that actually characterizes the story. I do believe that I can only think of one Hollywood film that out-gores this stage play, that would be Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Except that Reservoir Dogs was perhaps even subtle and understated compared to Titus Andronicus. One reviewer cautiously described the script like this: “This is a great play. We're talking fourteen dead bodies, kung-fu, sword-fu, spear-fu, dagger-fu, arrow-fu, pie-fu, animal screams on the soundtrack, heads roll, hands roll, tongues roll, nine and a half quarts of blood, and a record-breaking 94 on the vomit meter."

And in the hands of the very expert actors and directors at the new Globe, it was a fabulous show.

From my vantage point, I got to see it all. I quickly realized that I had chosen my seat with unintentional wisdom. For one, being just above the action meant that I could see some of the stage tricks and sleight-of-hand manuevers – heh, no pun intended – such as the quick turn of a prop that provided the murderous Aaron with the disembodied hand of his victim just as the axe hit the ground. But even more than that, being so deep up inside the rafters meant that I was shaded from the dizzying early-afternoon heat of a muggy summer day next to the Thames. The two hundred or so folks who were standing on the theatre floor were not so lucky, and somewhere in the middle of the second or third act, the first spectator went down. Just as the beautiful maiden Lavinia was dragged off stage to the accompaniment of a screaming soundtrack and then thrust back onto the stage in red-stained rags and with a prodigious slug of stage blood pouring down her chin, a young woman in the standing audience passed out, flat on her back, right there in the theatre. Within seconds two ushers were by her side, and in less than half a minute an attendant in a starched white uniform pushed through the crowd with a wheel chair. The girl came to, hauled herself up into the waiting chair, and was rolled out the side door before the title character had finished his soliloquy.

But then the real carnage began. The audience started dropping like flies. Inside the next fifteen minutes, three more spectators were wheeled out of the theatre – and that was just in the limited section of the theatre that I could see. In fact, two were wheeled out almost simultaneously, meaning that that the staff must have had at least two wheel chairs and two attendants ready to go at any given time. Moreover, one of the fallen was not even standing on the floor, but was seated (fortunately) in the first row on the lowest balcony. Another two dozen or so staggered off toward the doors propelled under their power and only trickled back in after dousing heads with cool water and fortifying themselves for another couple of acts back in the theatre. None of this would have been even remotely entertaining if it had seemed to me that any of them were seriously hurt, but since all of them picked themselves up off the floor with only minimal help, I figured no one was throwing a fatal clot into their brains or anything. As it was, since the action on the floor was producing a higher body count than the action on the stage, most of the remaining audience probably missed out on a good quarter hour of the play watching the real-life casualties. And that was all before intermission.

In any case, I was quite happy to be seated in the shade. While I have a pretty high tolerance for all sorts of gore – staged or otherwise – I also know I have a fairly low tolerance for standing around in the heat. If I didn’t know that already, I got a quick and sharp lesson on it last year when I scrubbed into an obgyn surgery one evening and nearly passed out into the patient’s open c-section incision. To be fair, I was on my fifth consecutive shift of night call and I had some ghastly virus that wasn’t the flu but sure felt like it. But from that I know my limits for standing still in sweaty conditions, and I could be fairly sure that I would be among the casualties down below if I hadn’t had the foresight and the cash to pay for a seat.

The remainder of the play was ever-more gory but produced no further emergencies among the audience. By the time intermission came along, the worst of the mid-day heat had passed, and those who were left standing were probably the heartiest of the bunch anyhow. Three hours after it started, the play ended with some half-dozen or so primary characters sprawled out in various pools of blood (some their own, some not), and a final monologue installed a minor character as the next emperor of Rome, and the figurative curtains came down. A good time was had by all.