Joining the mob?
August 23, 2012
I went down to Cardiff last week to catch the RSC/National Theatre Wales co-production of Coriolanus.
It was so worth the long journey. In my last blog post I talked about how the players and audience inhabit the same room together at the RST. Well, in this bold and visceral production the players and audience also inhabit the same action together.
It was a promenade production in a vast aircraft hangar, and I loved the way we could all make a choice as to how we watched it - by standing close to the actors and 'overhearing' what they were saying, or using our headphones and watching the action from a safer distance or, indeed, grabbing a stacking chair and watching the action on the gritty monochromatic screens.
At one point I was grabbed and dragged into the action as a representative of the Roman people. At another I was pinned against the wall in the middle of a battle. Loved it. Let's hope they find a good venue to give the show the same kind of further life as was deservedly awarded to Black Watch.
I imagine that being included and directly addressed in the action like the Roman mob is not so very different from the audience experience in the original Coriolanus at Shakespeare's own theatre.
Yesterday I bought a copy of the excellent Museum of London book Shakespeare's London Theatreland. So much has been discovered about the Elizabethan playhouses recently that it makes fascinating reading.
It prompted memories of how, more than 20 years ago, I got a call from a friend telling me to get down to Southwark Bridge immediately and help form a protective ring around the building site where they had discovered remarkably extant remains of the Rose Theatre. I was to phone two friends and ask them to do the same.
Within a few hours hundreds of people had assembled at the site and determinedly prevented the developers from destroying what is still the most comprehensive archeological evidence of late sixteenth century theatre ever found. The very stage upon which young Shakespeare and his fellow players had harangued their audience just as Richard Lynch and his colleagues did on Friday night
by Nick Day
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