Muse of Fire!
A happy accident places me on stage at Shakespeare's Globe for the first time in 20 years. I seize the opportunity to make a speech.
A- is a fellow bardophile, and a close friend who is travelling from New York to London on a business-related pretext. His true purpose is to spend time at Shakespeare’s Globe.
He knows that I share his soft spot for Shakespeare.1
I want all three bits. All 3 of them. The lot.
The first thing I do when I leave high school in New Zealand is work in a cafe to save enough money to buy get on a plane and present myself at Shakespeare’s Globe and request/demand an unpaid internship.
These are the days before people organized this kind of thing via email, and my attempts to win approval via official channels get lost in the post or something - I really can’t remember.
Patrick Spottiswoode is head of Globe Education and finds himself obliged to deal with me. In the restaurant, I recall, though I don’t know how I moved this conversation forward from the lobby.
P: So, you’ve come over from New Zealand to work here?
Me: Yes.
P: And, I mean… did you arrange -
Me: No.
P: Ah. Well. I see.
I make him an offer he doesn’t have the heart to refuse. I’m issued an all-access pass to six months of full immersion in all the goings-on at Shakespeare’s Globe. Mark Rylance is Artistic Director, he’s playing Hamlet, Vanessa Redgrave is playing Prospero and somewhere in the jumble and swirl of it all, my theatrical sensibility is forged and the course of my unusual path through life is set.
But that’s a long time ago now.
I return regularly to see shows, but I haven’t been backstage, or onstage since those magical days.
Then, at the end of the workshop, A- and I are dropped slap bang centre stage
We’re piecing together a scene with our ‘original practice’ cue sheets.
I’m right where I want to be, for what I really want to do.
An impromptu performance of Chorus’ speech from the start of Henry V - in which a representative of the theatrical craft solicits the audience’s indulgence and co-operation…
Chorus regrets that we can’t bring the past back to full vivid life before your eyes with body, voice and set - these imperfect tools of our art.
But what we can do, if you will, is fire up your imagination, so you can bring it back to full, vivid life in your mind’s eye.
Here’s me, in my happy place.
Or do I mean hard? 🫤
I love it so much.