I visited London on 23rd April to take part in the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The Globe put on a big event to show off all 37 of the Bard's plays along the South Bank and my sister and I, both being fans of his work, decided to check it out. 37 plays, 37 films, 37 screens. Seems like a good way to spend a Saturday, right?
Each film was 10 minutes of new footage shot on the locations Shakespeare imagined, combined with archive footage from performances at the Globe and internationally and some even included some very old silent, black and white footage. 10 minutes per film... we reckoned even with walking time we could cover quite a few of the 37, especially since we'd gone through and made a shortlist of the ones we really wanted to see.
We arrived in London about half an hour before the event was due to start and managed to make it to the first of our planned viewings - The Taming of the Shrew in Jubilee Gardens - just after 10am, the published start time. So imagine our annoyance, having got the 6:30am train, when we found that the screen wasn't even set up, let alone showing the film. Slightly peeved but putting it down to technical issues, we moved on and caught Titus Andronicus under the Hungerford Bridge.
Brilliant. A great combination of clips, with Peter Capaldi as an excellently unhinged Titus and a great clip of the Globe production in which the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, played by Indira Varma unknowingly eats a pie containing the body parts of her murdered sons. A chorus of "ew" mingled with laughter from the audience. Just a shame we couldn't hear half of it because Hungerford Bridge is a railway bridge and every couple of minutes a train rumbled across overhead.
Anyway, seeing that the screen (Henry VI, part 2) next to Titus was also playing, we were a bit more hopeful that the following screens would also be working. Of the next 2 we passed, 1 was working and we had not interest in Romeo and Juliet. Then we caught Love's Labours Lost - pretty cool. Tempted to check out the next screen showing King John, only because the archive footage was from 1899 and is probably the earliest instance of a Shakespeare production on film.
After that though... well, it all started going wrong. We walked up as far as the Tate Modern where there were supposed to be another 4 screens. Every screen between King John at the National Theatre and the screens at the Tate Modern was out. No film. No audio. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
That's 12 screens that weren't working. Out of 37. So we decided to grab a cuppa and wile away half an hour, during which time I tweeted at the Globe in an attempt to get an explanation for the absolute shambles. They first told me it was because of the Presidential visit and later claimed technical difficulties. I'm more inclined to go with the latter - that many screens not working isn't anything to do with security issues or the like.
Anyway, refreshed and all ranted out, we decided to see if some of the early screens were working. Nope. Buggeration. Descending back into grumpiness, we marched off down the bank and finally found a functioning screen in Gabriel's Wharf showing the wonderful A Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the more straightforward of Shakespeare's works and one of the funniest. Much laughter from the many people crowding into the bandstand.
Unfortunately, from there the chaos returned. A Midsummer Night's Dream was screen 13. From there, the next functioning screen we came across was Measure for Measure at screen 24. On the plus side, screen 25 just around the corner was showing Twelfth Night and it was brilliant, if a little drowned out at times by the rail bridge overhead. Seem to be an awful lot of rail bridges over the Thames...
From there, we had a little more success and caught a run of working screens that included Troilus & Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear and Macbeth. All great, although Troilus & Cressida was rather ruined by being down in a hole which made it very hard to view. Did catch the snippet from the Maori production a few years ago. Genius, that, putting a haka in Shakespeare.
After Macbeth it all went downhill yet again. No working screens from there up until the very last screen which was showing The Tempest near Tower Bridge. Another wonderful little production and awesome to see so many people enjoying Shakespeare, but such a shame more of the screens weren't working.
A little bit cold and disappointed, we headed back along the bank, passing still non-functional screens, and decided to revisit some of the missing films from that morning. Some success was had - we caught a great Othello featuring David Harewood, an interesting take on Hamlet with several actors playing the Prince of Denmark and, much to my sister's delight, an excellent Much Ado About Nothing featuring Samuel West among others. Given that Much Ado is one of my sister's favourites, I'm glad we at least caught that one.
This was followed by the excellent Toby Jones playing Falstaff in Henry IV, pt 1 although he did rather drown out the also wonderful Johnathon Pryce playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice on the next screen. Glad to see so many screens now working and getting rather short on time, we made one last attempt on The Taming of the Shrew. We found it working, at last although as we left to catch the train back home there were still screens not playing.
In all, a lovely day, with a stroll along the Thames and a whole heap of culture thrown in for good measure. It's just such a shame that such a huge event could be so badly organised. As mentioned above, I actually Tweeted the Globe to try to find out why it was going so wrong and they produced the following response:
@ZoeDixon Hi, there's been a delay due to the presidential visit but we hope to have all screens playing as soon as possible. Thanks!— Shakespeare's Globe (@The_Globe) April 23, 2016
They also told other users that there had been some technical issues. I'm more inclined to believe the latter, given that as I pointed out to the poor bugger manning the Globe Twitter account, they should have taken the presidential visit into account. Let's just hope that they learn from this and the next time they try anything on this scale they'll organise it better.
In the end, we managed to see 15 of the 37 films. Not bad given that when we left, around 11 screens still didn't seem to be working although I'm told all 37 were working by the end of the day.
Did you visit the complete walk? What was your favourite film? How many did you manage to see?
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