Richard and the Drowndlings

Audience at the GlobeYou aren't supposed to take photos at Shakespeare's Globe in London, but this is a picture of the audience not the players. It was at the end of the interval of the matinée of Richard the Third last Saturday.

No sooner had Mark Rylance started to utter the first lines of the play, in soliloquy - "Now is the winter of our discontent/made glorious summer ... " than the heavens opened and it POURED for the duration, enbellished by thunder and lightning. Indeed the rain was so loud that you couldn't always hear the actors.

In the interval the Ladies was apparently full of women trying to dry their sodden clothes under the hand-drier! You can see how many people had bought the flimsy £2.50 plastic macs but really it was such a soaker, only sou'westers  would have been a protection.

The groundlings were troopers. The only gaps you can see are because some came and sheltered in the overhang of the galleries. I don't think anyone went home. And this production was sold out. I tried not to feel guilty in the back row of the Lower Gallery with somewhere to lean my back as well as out of the weather.

It's a play absolutely jam-packed with references to the sun and the weather.
says Richmond (later Henry Vll) just before the Battle of Bosworth Field - a forecast some were glad of.


And right on cue, after his victory, when Richmond said, "
Over on my other blog
But here I'm talking about the play not the man. Rylance's performance was extraordinary - a cross between an English king and Count Arthur Strong! And yet it worked, the bumbling and vague Duke of Gloucester, disingenuously claiming not that he was innocent but that he had killed his victims out of love - first for Anne Neville and then his niece, Elizabeth of York.

That Elizabeth didn't appear in this production, but her mother Elizabeth Woodville (Queen Elizabeth) did and was very well played by Samuel Barnett. For this was an all-male cast, as it would have been when performed in Shakespeare's day. Barnett was Posner in The History Boys (on stage and in the film) and he made an excellent woman. Lady Anne was less good, though she was a lovely ghost.

My favourite female character, Margaret of Anjou, "the She-wolf of France" had been cut altogether from this rather stripped down version of the text. And that was a shame. Not only do we lose,


but that wonderful incantation:

in the scene she plays with Richard's mother, the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth, widow of Edward lV.  I missed that.

image by Georges Seguin (Okki)Mark Rylance limped on with a white rose in his hand and gave it to a woman in the front row (I hope it survived the storm). The White Rose is the traditional symbol of the House of York so all the more puzzling that the programme carried the red rose on the front (a symbol of the House of Lancaster though the scene in which the rival factions pluck their blooms in "Henry Vl" was invented by Shakespeare).

I wonder how often Shakespeare's groundlings were drenched to the skin? And how much fun the actors had improvising round the text on a really wet day?