The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 25.027  Tuesday, 14 January 2014

 

From:        Julia Crockett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         January 11, 2014 at 7:08:48 PM EST

Subject:    Re: SHAKSPER: Building Wanamaker Playhouse

 

[Editor’s Note: The following excerpt appeared in The Guardian. –hardy]

 

Building Wanamaker Playhouse

 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/12/sam-wanamaker-playhouse-globe-review

 

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – Review

 

Seventeen years after the completion of Sam Wanamaker’s rebuilt Globe, a painstakingly recreated Jacobean indoor theatre has opened next door, complete with oak frame, ornate roof and 17th-century lighting…

 

The reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, which opened in 1997 and was designed by the late Theo Crosby, could be pure kitsch, a Madame Tussauds-grade piece of tourist tat. That it is not, that it manages to be a serious and adventurous theatre, is down to its artistic direction, but also to its fabric. There is the striking, daring fact of it being open-air in a soggy climate. There is also its literal-minded pursuit of thatched-roofed, green-oak authenticity with a conceptual rigour that would make it worthy to enter the collection of the nearby Tate Modern. It is so quixotic, in a post-industrial context like nothing Shakespeare knew, that you can only be impressed.

 

Now a 340-seat Jacobean theatre has been created in the Globe complex, called the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse after the American actor who fought heroically for decades to get the Globe rebuilt. Planned long ago, it occupies a brick shell – built to house it at the same time as the Globe itself was reconstructed – which has been temporarily inhabited by education spaces and other uses. It stands close to the wooden O, slightly downstream and slightly set back from the Thames waterfront.

 

[ . . . ]

 

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