?Only one thing afflicts me,? John Marston wrote to readers of his play The Malcontent, ?to think that scenes invented merely to be spoken should be enforcively published to be read?. Shakespeare never took the trouble to write a letter to readers of his plays, observes Patrick Spottiswoode.
I wonder how much he cared. John Marston could only hope that his readers would recall the pleasure the play ?once afforded you? when it was presented ?with the soul of lively action?.
?Lively Action? is the name Globe Education gives to its programme for schools and universities. Every year over 55,000 students and teachers come to the Globe for a workshop, study day, INSET day, degree course or MA. Many more people come for one of our continuing education lectures, courses or staged readings. Globe Education?s programme runs year round but the Globe Education Season runs from October to March. For these six months all workshops and courses culminate with practical work on the Globe stage. This gives students and teachers the opportunity to experience the playing conditions of Shakespeare?s workplace at first hand. The stage is in use morning, noon and night.
We have Sam Wanamaker to thank for that. He founded Globe Education in 1989 ? eight years, as it turned out, before the theatre opened for its first season of plays. He wanted people of all ages and nationalities to share in his passion for Shakespeare, for the arts and for Southwark, and to share in the discoveries that would be made by playing the plays in the architecture for which they were written.
Sam wanted the Globe to be festive and open to all. Exhibitions, music, crafts, poetry were all part of his vision for Bankside and for a centre dedicated to performance and education. He would have been thrilled to see Tate Modern open next door. He would have been thrilled by the Millennium Footbridge and he would not have been surprised to see how the arts on Bankside were helping to regenerate the most important, as well as the once most neglected, theatre area of the world.
On his last visit to the site before he died in 1993, Sam knelt painfully in what is now the piazza surrounding the Globe. He got up and then asked for the perimeter wall to be lowered. If not, he complained, children would not be able to look in. The walls around Shakespeare are high and hard to climb for many people, old and young. Today, students who may never have been to a theatre are expected not only to read plays, but also to answer exam questions on them. A text is a printed monument. Words lie on a page, lifeless shadows of their spoken selves. It is difficult to rouse them into action in a theatre let alone in a classroom. No wonder many students are put off Shakespeare at school. Globe Education seeks to introduce students to the living beating pulse of a play, in part by introducing them to the people who help to make the words work ? actors, directors, musicians, voice and movement coaches, designers and fight directors.
Those unable to come to the Globe can share in the discoveries too. Every year 100 schools around the world can join ?Adopt an Actor?, and interact with one of ten actors in the Globe Theatre Company. Students engage with their adopted actor via web conversations from the first day of rehearsal to the last performance and are thus able to follow the process of creating a role and a production for the Globe.
Parents and guardians can bring their 8-12 year olds to ?ChildsPlay? workshops while they go to the Saturday matinee. These workshops offer active introductions to the same play and are timed so that the children can go into the yard of the Globe for the last twenty minutes of the production. They stand there transfixed by the magic and by the lively action. Perhaps if I had had a similar workshop when I was 12 rather than being expected to sit through an entire production of The Flying Dutchman, I might now be an avid opera-goer. Thus, while I applaud the motives behind offering children free seats at theatres and opera houses, I worry that the philanthropy might be misguided. The unprepared visit is more likely to put off students than engage them.
How to introduce ?Creative Arts in the Classroom? will be the subject of a part-time MA for teachers that I hope will commence in 2004 and involve a variety of arts organisations in London. What are the best ways of engaging children with artforms, artists and arts institutions? How do we prevent the walls from appearing too high? The idea for the MA came from work on projects with teachers in Southwark. Our most successful projects are those created with teachers rather than for them, and we are fortunate in having dedicated and inspiring teachers to work with in the 36 schools involved in our community projects for this year. One, the annual ?Our Theatre? project, is play specific. Schools will present their own production of Richard III in the Globe. Children involved in another project, ?Shakespeare: the Right to Reply?, will write programme notes and reviews of the production. This is the second of a three-year project with the same children. Last year their focus was ?Preparing to Speak?. Next year they will develop IT skills and share their experiences and discoveries with the world via a web page. Shakespeare is thus used as a catalyst to help develop a range of skills.
The opening word of Richard III is ?Now? ? appropriate and arresting for a live event. It is that ?now-ness? that Marston feared would be lost on the page and which some critics thought might be lost in a reconstructed wooden O. I think they may be coming round?
Patrick Spottiswoode is Director of Globe Education w: http://www.shakespeares-globe.org; e: patrick@shakespearesglobe.com