Whether it's helicopters rumbling overhead or actors losing their inhibitions, open-air performances offer the thrilling ? and entirely theatrical ? sense that anything can happen
Like food, music and sex, theatre acquires something extra when it's enjoyed in the open air. There's a special chemistry between actors and audience when they can make eye contact in daylight, and nowhere, I think, is this more true than at Shakespeare's Globe on London's South Bank.
As a regular groundling at the Globe, I've been trying to analyse where the excitement comes from, and how it differs from what happens in indoor theatre. Stanislavski isn't much help, but Brecht is quite relevant, and Peter Brook's concept of "rough theatre" is a useful starting point.
In The Empty Space, written in 1968 (when the replica Globe was still a gleam in Sam Wanamaker's eye), Brook isn't primarily concerned with indoor and outdoor performance. But his description of rough theatre seems to me to sum up what the Globe is all about: "Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that's not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles; audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables; audiences joining in, answering back ?"
Some of this original Shakespearean roughness has been smoothed over since Mark Rylance, the first artistic director, handed over to Dominic Dromgoole; some recent productions have used over-elaborate sets which stray from the original concept. But this season has kicked off with two excellent productions that have exploited the theatre's unique space to the full ? All's Well that End's Well and Much Ado About Nothing. When the All's Well cast walk out on stage before the play and say hello to the groundlings, it's a clever way of creating a relationship of complicity between actors and audience. Complicity and Brechtian alienation are just two sides of the same coin.
Janie Dee, who plays the Countess of Roussillon, is just one of the experienced actors who have swapped the relative predictability of indoor performance for the uncertainty of the Globe, with its risk of getting soaked by rain, divebombed by pigeons or buzzed by passing helicopters. In a recent post-show talk I attended, she talked approvingly about the venue's atmosphere; also its sense of risk.
With the invisible fourth wall between actors and audience dismantled, the cast have to project themselves in a different way. Experienced Globe actor Peter Hamilton Dyer said it's not a place for anyone who likes to mutter like Johnny Depp in closeup. But there's more to it than projection; as Dee went on to explain, the close contact with the audience makes actors feel that they can do whatever they like. Hamilton Dyer added that there's a constant danger of overplaying, especially in comedy. "You must never lose the connection to the play on stage. You know when you have lost it."
Some reviewers have criticised exactly this, and there's no doubt in the Globe's Much Ado that Eve Best as Beatrice and Charles Edwards as Benedick play off the audience: when they finally kiss after nearly three hours of what screenwriters call UST (unresolved sexual tension), there are whoops and cheers from the groundlings. But the crucial fact for me is that neither of them steps out of Shakespearean character; both Beatrice and Benedick are natural attention-seekers. Exactly the same is true of Falstaff, the role in which Roger Allam, holding the Globe audience in the palm of his hand, deservedly won the Olivier Best Actor award in 2010.
Darkened indoor theatres discourage this complicity between actors and audience, though anyone who has been to a Christmas panto knows it's far from impossible ? the actors just have to work harder to tear down the fourth wall. The National Theatre's One Man, Two Guvnors borrows shamelessly from panto by getting audience members up on stage ? something I haven't ever seen tried at the Globe. Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, worried about the verfremdungseffekt, the so-called distancing effect, probably didn't do it either. I don't know whether the Bunteresque James Corden asking Row A of the Lyttleton theatre stalls for something to eat fits the definition of rough theatre, but the result is very funny.
To paraphrase Peter Brook: "A man with an empty stomach asks for a sandwich whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged." And, as every pigeon knows, sandwiches always taste better outdoors.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/jun/22/open-air-theatre-better
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