A Midsummer Night's Dream, Globe

With Rice’s ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ production, this is almost ‘too much of a good thing’, oddly enough. Rice’s intentions are wonderful, her innovations great. Rice’s regime will be very very good, and everything good about it was in here. So why would I merely give it three stars? That’s the problem: EVERYTHING was in here, including not just too many un-Globey ideas about how to stage Shakespeare, but every exciting mistake she’ll make. It’s good that Rice has her own identity and isn’t a Dromgoole carbon copy, it’s good that her regime is going to be more gender-balanced and inclusive and it’s good that she’s going to prioritise modernity, but good grief the anti-Bardolatory and the in-jokes and the blindingly unnecessary technology... In only her second Shakespeare but first of many to come, I think Rice wanted to show us everything she felt the Globe could be, should be and will be; rather than take ten years to make a point, she made it in three hours. The Globe under her looks set to be raucous, rollicking fun, irreverent, modern, appealing to new audiences, legitimately fun. Her Midsummer was. But this wasn’t a show as much as a show-off, and there’s the rub.

So much about this was so so lovely. Firstly, the great innovation of changing Helena to Helenus had nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with casting Ankur Bahl, who was really really lovely! With his lovely lovelorn longing and his sense of fun, he made Helenus a sympathetic but never self-pitying, stronger-than-usual lover. This production seemed mostly to care for those four lovers, with a down-to-earthness and normality to them I found quite charming, and real comic pizzazz in those four performances. Beyond that, plenty of nice touches – genuine debauchery within the fairies (though I found Puck too shouty), genuine care towards the mechanicals, genuinely unpredictable whimsy, stunning music which shows that Rice (like her predecessors) can subtly reference the play’s darker, more intellectual aspects in a way which doesn’t interfere with the fun (using Indian music and musicians, Rice is clearly answering anti-colonial scholars who critique the stealing of an Indian baby). And the inclusion of Beyonce and Bowie in this, of all buildings, was surprising and sweet, the kind of newness and modernity that was, too often, squandered by Globe traditions.

The issue was I can enjoy debauched fairies and Hoxton lovers and Globe ushers and new technology and colonial appropriation critique in isolation; thrown together in this very special theatre, it did not make a coherent show. A Dromgoole show (or a Luscombe or Dunster or Macintyre or Carroll or Rylance show there) tended to have a simplicity of purpose: primarily, make something current out of a clunky old circle. This had a complexity of intention, more about how any Shakespeare could be staged there, and less about how this Shakespeare should. Plus these lovely touches were one of too many ‘new’ aspects, alongside the neon, alongside weirdly insider and mean-spirited in-jokes... I actually think this exact show could have been wonderful, but the anti-Dromgoole anti-Rylance newness of it overwhelmed it. There was almost a meta-voice shouting over the top “WE CAN HAVE T-SHIRTS NOT CODPIECES, WE CAN HAVE SPOTLIGHTS NOT JUST THE SUN, WE CAN CALL IT HOXTON THE WORDS CAN BE REWRITTEN, WE CAN HAVE ADLIBS, WE CAN HAVE...” and that made the show a ‘statement’, not a ‘production’. I admire almost every single aspect of this show, because I can tell Rice’s irreverence is going to shake up the building in a good way, but ‘not the sum of its parts’ comes to mind – too many parts I love make for an inconsistent and un-unified sum I merely quite liked instead.

As for removing the USP of the Globe, I do and don’t agree. Would the Bard have staged a three man Tempest? In 1612, would troupes from Belarus and Israel and Hip Hop have performed these works? Would a play like Nell Gwynn have happened, and if so presumably with not Gugu Mbatha-Raw but Richard Burbage? And presumably Prospero would be played by someone most unlike Vanessa Redgrave? The Globe’s historical value was only ever one part of it from the beginning. Rylance wasn’t a traditionalist and nor was Dromgoole, so why should Rice be? I think it’s the nature of the changes, though: whatever else, the Globe had its limits, and ‘updating’ it would ruin the point. Neon... Particularly the theoretical aspects – gender switching, sexuality switching and tasteful technology – are wonderful, but giant neon and bogstandard modern costumes seem more like working against the space, rather than with it. If next year is filled with costumes and cod-pieces I’ll feel there’s been backtracking, but I hope next year isn’t quite so anti-Globe. Mostly, less neon.

What made Dromgoole great, incidentally, was that he used the limitations and the history of the Globe to be academically incisive. Last year his Measure For Measure stood contrary to Cheek by Jowl and Gibbons-Hill’s two grimy political reinterpretations, making the problem play unproblematic fun for the groundlings; rather than make it more shallow, however, he found the heart few had seen in it before, and found something truly romantic in that very weird romance. If his Measure for Measure could have flooded the Globe with sex toys, there’d have been no need for it to be at the Globe (might have made standing in the pit an awful lot more fun, mind, though this from the Oresteia kind of did the job); due to the Globe’s Jacobethan problems, it often ended up the most insightful modern Shakespearean stage in town. There is a risk that without the Globe’s problems you don’t have anything to solve, and that would be a shame.

And perversely, I think the all-encompassing modernisation may have worked against Rice. I wonder if there’d have been something even more revelatory, and even more progressive, about turning Helena into Helenus in the rigid society of the seventeenth century. And I also think that making the Mechanicals the Globe ushers would have still worked – and been funnier – had the rest of the show been staidly Shakespearean.

So when I say “Too much of a good thing”, my cup did nor o’erflow with joy during this, though I did laugh a lot. Simply, there were too many good prospects for the future, which made for a baggy three hour show. I think Rice took everything ‘good’ she wants to do with the building over the next ten years – stage Shakespeare as a modern, progressive, updated, flippant two-fingers to Bardolatry with no qualms about modernising the place – and overpacked her first show with her mission statement. I think her 2017 and 2018 shows will be more subtle, more old-fashioned and more Globe-y, whilst I hope her 2017 and 2018 shows will keep the adventure and fun and modernity of this. Her 2016 show, though, was buckling under the weight of proving many, many points about Shakespeare as modern (points most of us got over at least ten years ago), points about how Shakespeare can accommodate irreverence and rewriting (points the Globe could have taken years ago), points about how Shakespeare is going to be inclusive (points we all welcome). As such, it was a bit crazy, modern in weirdly unnecessary ways, and too much neon, but I welcome the changes and I welcome a wonderful new regime by Rice. We now know everything she intends the Globe to be, and (neon aside) it’s going to be modern and it’s going to be inclusive and it’s going to be wonderful. Her mission statement I agree with wholly. Her comedy I found hilarious. I just do hope her next production is actually, vaguely, somehow, slightly, Shakespearean.