Shakespeare at The Globe!

 

By the way, if you want to understand where modern theatre, and even modern drama, were born – or just to have a great night/afternoon/evening out – then get ye down to a small carpark at the back of Queen Street, where the world’s first and only replica of Shakespeare’s Second Globe Theatre has just ‘popped up.’*

It’s called The Pop-Up Globe, logically: a full-scale, temporary working replica of the Second Globe Theatre wherein so many of Shakespeare’s finest plays were born and raised and worked into maturity.

“Shakespeare in the space for which it was written.”

And it’s an amazing space, so intimate that you’re part of all the action; the stage itself so vast that it all but fills the interior atrium, leaving just enough space for ‘groundlings’ to interact with the performers; the performances themselves so vital (the performers themselves being energised by the place) that you don’t want to miss even a heartbeat.

Not just enjoyable: you leave enjoying the plays in a whole new light, not as the dreary sops to propriety you might have thought from your schoolroom introduction, but as profound, earthy, entertaining wonders of drama.

So this is really not any kind of review. It’s simply unabashed praise for a great conception realised magnificently well.

You have until 24^th April to enjoy eight of The Bard’s greatest delivered in the manner he intended. There’s nothing else like it. Don’t miss out.

If you’re in Auckland, go. If you’re not in Auckland, then get here so you can go.

You only get the chance once every four-hundred years.

---

* The Globe Theatre reconstruction in London is of the First Globe, the larger theatre that burned down to be replaced by the Second, more intimate, Globe – a very different size and shape to the first one.