Download Intern Diary – July 18th – Aug 15th

Week 13 & 14
It is difficult to believe these are my final weeks here at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. I will avoid reflecting on this until the end of
this diary entry, and focus instead on the work I have been doing at the end of my time here. These last few weeks have seen, first of
all, the wrapping up of the End of Season Interviews that I will be working with-- more will happen with other companies as their
performances wrap up, but that will be after I finish my internship. I especially enjoyed my first Interview with a director. This one
was with Matthew Dunster, the director of Faustus and past productions with the Globe as well. This had a nice symmetry for me, as
I also had the opportunity to sit in on and observe rehearsals for this production, seeing Matthew in action. This production of Faustus
was simply a delight, especially considering how difficult this play is to stage effectively. A common pitfall with staging Faustus, or
any theater-making really, is allowing the spectacle to run away with the show and leave the story behind. Directors can often be
seduced into staging spectacle or some specific special effect for its own sake, in other words, to the neglect of the story. From
beginning to end, Matthew’s production always met the challenge of staging spectacular special effects and design elements which
were in turn in service of the story. Achieving both of these at once is very difficult, and his production pulled it off. To then get to
talk to Matthew about his process, his thoughts on staging the play at the Globe, on working with the A- and B-texts, on early modern
drama in general, provided me with a real sense of completion with my experience with the production.
During my time here at the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, I have also been working on a research paper on theories of laughter. When
I arrived here I had already done some work on the paper, and planned on suggesting a revised theory in relation Bergson, Freud, and
Bataille, one that proceeded from an embodied perspective on laughter. A major change in my thinking occurred, however, while
living in this city and working at this theatre. This is the longest I have lived in a European city, having only made week-long trips in
the past. Really living, settling in and experiencing day-to-day life with its rhythms and contours, in a European capital like London,
changes you. I mentioned in my first entry in this Diary the distinct pace of life that exists in London- even at the simple level of how
fast you walk through the London Underground. When I visited here in the past, I remember experiencing that pace of life as an
outsider and finding it fascinating even as I realized I did not have enough time to match it. Much like records that have to played at
the right speed to work, when you match the pace of living in London the city comes into resolution for you. During my time here I
got to experience that transition, from being out-of-pace with a blurry city and its fast-moving denizens to seeing it clearly and hearing
its music. As I moved through that transition, my experience of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre changed as well. For the first time in my
life, I experienced what it was like for the everyday to be suffused by the raw presence of a very specific manifestation of “history”.
A history that rises up into the skyline along the north bank of the Thames and gazes across the river at you while you stand in front of
the Globe. The mixture of modern, early modern, medieval, and earlier histories in the buildings in London march into the rhythms of
your life and take up residence there as you settle into inhabiting the city as your home. Day trips to Oxford and St. Albans, and a
week in Edinburgh, Scotland for the Fringe Festival, coupled with the experience of history I was having in London and amplified it.
Finally, the reason I say a “specific kind of history”, is that this is not the same history that stands before you in a desert gazing at a
rock formation, looking up at the Southern Cross in the night sky on the beach in the Southern Hemisphere, or listening to a high
school football game on the radio as you blaze down the highway through the Texas panhandle in your ’72 Chevy Chevelle on a hot
summer’s day with no air-conditioning besides two windows and your imagination. This is old, crowded European history, a
cacophony of architectural timelines, worn down cobble-stones and Pizza Express, a crisp grey morning walking the trace of history
and minding the gap. You live at the right speed in this city, and it admits you into the tissue of times that define it.
Going through this transition changed, in turn, my experience of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The building itself gathers up this
tissue and folds it over on itself, history and time itself bunch up into the seats and yard and the stage at the Globe. Time literally
folds into space in there. And you begin to see not only several different cultures and theatre-going practices crisscrossing the
audience, but the whole mélange of timelines and historical traces in London in general spreading like a net or wompy grid across the
audience and actors. These lines run through you too, of course. I had the distinct experience one night, standing in the audience
during a performance, of laughing “in history”. And for a moment it was as though my laughter was echoing down a corridor
connecting us to ghostly afterimages of audiences in London’s distant past when these plays were first staged. It was not exactly as
though I was transported into the past, laughing with the audience that night (not any more than London as a whole simply gives you
this experience), but rather I experienced laughing in a kind of temporal echo chamber. I did not go anywhere, but the sound of my
laughter bounced amongst the superimposition of several layers of culture and time all concentrated in one place. And like a bat’s
echo-location, the sound of laughter we all shared the production of located me in a fragment of mixed time that draped down around
me as I stood there and literally changed the way I see the globe.
I want to thank Amy Kenny and Sarah Dustagheer, two of my senior collogues at the Globe, for giving me an outlet to vent these
thoughts and for challenging my thinking to continue along these lines. I would also like thank the Globe’s head Librarian and
Archivist, Jordan Landes and Ruth Frendo, for fielding my thinking about life in London in general and at the Globe. Finally, my
biggest thanks goes to Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper for giving me the chance to have this experience, for teaching me so much about
Shakespeare and the Globe, and for creating so many rewarding opportunities for me during my time here- including this diary! I
would not have had this life-changing experience without her making it possible, and I will forever be in her debt.