Worlds Elsewhere (33 page)

These early American Globes were freewheeling affairs, based on the scantiest research. But they left a substantial historical imprint. At Cleveland's Globe a quick-witted seventeen-year-old Jewish American actor called Sam Wanamaker spent the summer of 1936 performing with an outfit called the New Globe Players. Thirty years later, now a respected actor and political activist who had fled to Britain because of McCarthyism, Wanamaker turned his mind to raising yet another replica – this time as accurate as scholarship could make it – as close to the original site on London's Bankside as possible.

In the event, the London Globe took nearly a quarter of a century to build, in the face of aggrieved opposition that numbered everyone from Southwark Council to left-leaning academics who derided what they saw as Wanamaker's attempts to erect a Disneyfied piece of Merrie England on their doorstep. Wanamaker had to fight a court case and raise the money himself, a significant portion of it American, which led to frequent roastings in the press. He died in 1993, before the Globe project was complete. It would be years before the monumental scale of his achievement – and the insights yielded by a working model of Shakespeare's outdoor theatre – could be realised.

There was a powerful irony here, one that brought me back to the Blackfriars replica in Staunton. Not only had one of London's major heritage attractions been created by a Yank, it had its origins in the glorious inauthenticity of the world's-fair Globes, and in ‘tabloid'
Shakespeare performed to holidaying audiences for a handful of dollars. The very idea of ‘authentic' Shakespeare, not as sober scholarly experiment but as popular, money-making exercise, was inherently American. Only under considerable duress had the British allowed it to be exported back to the UK.

I sensed another irony, too, in the ghostly presence of Gold Gulch, now lost somewhere beneath Balboa Park. When the Old Globe first opened, audiences for Shakespeare probably hadn't been so huge in California since the Gold Rush. Calling this theme-park entertainment didn't have to be an insult. It was in the finest American traditions.

Early evening in San Diego was as sweet as the day had been fierce: a clear and vacant sky, suffused with diluted violet, palm trees streaked with the last red-gold of the sun. Flocks of visitors were roaming the park. Everywhere there seemed to be roving professional photographers, manhandling well-dressed couples into glades or draping them artfully against Spanish colonial walls. Above them, on picturesque cue, was a rising moon, chalky yellow. Over the contented ripple of conversation and the quiet
tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk
of the evening joggers, I could hear the soft buzz of cicadas. Every so often, somewhere in the distance, there was the lowing of the railroad.

After several weeks' travelling, I had finally found myself back at the beginnings of Shakespeare in America: a performance of
Richard III,
the play that had become a home-grown hit in New York in 1750 and gone on to be so hugely popular in the nineteenth century. It would be mildly fraudulent to claim this was pure happenstance: of the dozens of festival listings I had browsed, this had been the only staging I could find. Whatever power Richard Gloucester once had over the American theatregoing imagination, it had waned. But, having come this far, I wasn't going to miss a chance to meet him in person.

The Old Globe festival theatre wasn't dissimilar from Cal Shakes: a broad stage surrounded by a horseshoe of tiered seats, with a latticework of telegraph poles holding up the lighting rig. I'd seen folk festivals with more sophisticated set-ups. With the trees crowding behind and the scatter of moths in the lights, it had a pleasingly bucolic air.

The audience was of a different order from the one I'd seen in Orinda. Maybe it was the weather, but everything felt several notches
more relaxed. Blonde girlfriends in stilettos and tiny cocktail dresses were taking their seats; middle-aged dudes with goatees and sunglasses moseying around in wide cargo pants and baggy T-shirts. There was plenty of white hair sprinkled through the audience, but it was a younger crowd than I'd seen at a performance of Shakespeare for as long as I could remember.

There was only one word for
Richard III
itself: muscular. Richard Gloucester, played by the Seattle-born Steppenwolf graduate Jay Whittaker, sported a leather biker jacket and trousers that were worryingly tight. With lip curled in permanent disdain and a scream that resembled an
F-16
taking off, he even managed to make the limp into a kind of macho strut. While researching the production I had come across an interview with Whittaker about his prowess on the surfboard. In San Diego, even Richard Crookback caught waves.

Subtle it wasn't. With its camouflage netting and helicopter sound effects, it was rather too obviously indebted to post-Gulf War productions of the history plays that had become over-familiar in Britain (the director was a visiting Brit, Lindsay Posner). But its vivacity and energy reminded me why
Richard III
was one of Shakespeare's earliest hits, and why it was never out of print in his lifetime.

It is, of course, the ultimate actor's play. Even when Richard is ostensibly doing nothing, he's doing everything: fidgeting, skittering across the stage, pushing and prodding, directing events (‘Bustle, bustle,' he urges his followers before Bosworth), relentlessly bending circumstances to his will. Shakespeare channelled much of that energy from his main source, an anonymous play called
The True Tragedie of Richard the Third,
which, though printed in 1594, soon after Shakespeare's version went on stage, likely dates from much earlier. This Richard, too, is forever the hustler:

In both plays, Richard is director in all but name.

The Old Globe's staging also possessed something I'd been craving since Washington: politics. The Earl of Richmond, blonde and blue-eyed, could have stepped out of a campaign poster; I half-expected to see his victory over Richard at Bosworth attended by cheerleaders. Yet
so bleak was the production's view of power that even this moment – the founding of the Tudor dynasty, for generations held up by critics as Shakespeare's obedient celebration of the Tudor Myth – had a metallic tang of irony. During his stump speech on the eve of battle Richmond announced:

One could imagine the lines on a Tea Party T-shirt.

Something else struck me as I watched: even given the nationality of the director, how all-American the play seemed. Many people I'd talked to on my journey had brought up the vexed relationship between the United States and Britain when it came to Shakespeare – if not quite, these days, a full-blown Forrest–Macready rivalry, something a little more anxious and subcutaneous. Broadway was awash with British productions; British theatre names had become huge stars on American TV and film. Whenever a UK company brought Shakespeare across to America, it was regarded as somehow the real deal – Shakespeare as it should be done. The cut-glass British accents, inauthentic though of course they were, only helped maintain the illusion.

Here, in a festival theatre on the Pacific seaboard, something different seemed to be going on: a connection to an older, properly American kind of Shakespeare, with some similarities to its British cousin but also invigoratingly distinct. This Shakespeare was rougher and less cautious, more energetic – more alive, I thought. It was hugely heartening to see an American actor making great strides as Richard III, as his predecessors had done a century and a half before.

I thought back to the American Richards I'd encountered in the last weeks – Abigail Adams's ardent hope that George III might be left bawling ‘a horse, a horse', Frederick B. Warde's scuttling silent-movie villain, Abraham Lincoln doing ‘Now is the winter …' from memory, Walter Leman performing Bosworth on a billiard table, Junius Brutus Booth refusing to go down at the end and playfully, doggedly fighting on. It was common to regard Richard as a villain, perhaps one of Shakespeare's most malevolent. He was also one of the most appealing characters – the smartest, the funniest – in the canon.

On the way out through the lobby, I passed a bust of Shakespeare: a
bronze by the French artist Albert Carrier-Belleuse. It caught the poet in a moment of supernal inspiration, head nobly tilted down, garments billowing around his neck like Lear in the storm.

There was one cosmetic modification: half his cranium was missing. The bronze had been in the Old Globe the night it went up in flames in March 1978 and was hit by a piece of falling masonry. Borne aloft from the burning building, it had been placed here as a sign of the Old Globe's Blitz spirit. Shakespeare looked long-suffering, but also as though he'd survive.

Nor was Richard dead and buried in America, not just yet. Months after I got back, well into plotting the next phase of my journey – and just as worldwide excitement was building about the discovery of the remains of the real King Richard III beneath a car park in Leicester – I saw an article in the
New Yorker.
It was about a new drama soon to air on Netflix; a gamble for the website, a thirteen-part series only available online. It was a political saga, the story of a savagely ambitious congressman, Frank Underwood, who hacks and slashes his way to the vice-presidency. David Fincher and Beau Willimon produced, Kevin Spacey starred. Their title was
House of Cards.

As an over-earnest, over-politicised twelve-year-old I'd watched the original BBC
House of Cards,
scripted by Michael Dobbs and Andrew Davies, and thrilled to its skulduggerous portrayal of Westminster life. There were back-stabbings galore, all manner of plot and counterplot, but in every sense the dark heart of the drama was Ian Richardson's icily ironic Francis Urquhart, Tory chief whip. A self-proclaimed ‘back-room boy', he coolly manoeuvred his way right to the front.

What I missed then, I realised now: Urquhart, too, had a doppelgänger. Richardson had been an eminent actor at the RSC; Urquhart's rise and eventual fall were closely patterned on
Richard III.
The echoes were everywhere one cared to look – Richardson's drawling soliloquies to camera (one memorably conducted at a urinal), the blithe and systematic silencing of his enemies, the eerily sexless seduction of a younger woman; most of all, perhaps, the depiction of power-lust as a raw, unhaltable force.

The Crookback was back. Spacey's most recent stage role had been a touring production of
Richard III
done in the best barnstorming,
nineteenth-century style, which had started at London's Old Vic before heading to San Francisco, New York and other cities worldwide. He and Fincher had dropped numerous hints about the new script's indebtedness to Shakespeare – not just
Richard III
but
Othello
and
Macbeth.
There was an amplified part for Underwood's scheming wife and a likeably gullible president who, though white, bore more than a passing resemblance to the Moor of Venice. Like its nineteenth-century forebears, the script was heavily doctored, but the film-makers had found a Shakespearian poetry of their own: shots of scurrying spiders, a Civil War subplot, Spacey relentlessly breaking the fourth wall …

The only thing missing from the
New Yorker
article was the sense that this had happened before, 160 years earlier, when
Richard III
was acclaimed as the greatest American play of them all.

But perhaps that didn't matter. It was good to see Shakespeare back in prime time, and with a shot at vice-president to boot. Something told me he would make it to the White House.

In the mid-1960s, a young Indian-American production house called Merchant Ivory was in trouble. Their first movie, 1963's
The Householder
– an ambling comedy about the marital difficulties of a schoolteacher and his wife – had not been a success. ‘The best to be said for their effort is that it represents an earnest try at reflecting middle-class life in modern India,' sniffed the
New York Times,
labelling the pace sluggish and the acting ‘ponderous'. The critic Bosley Crowther was especially irked by one of the cast, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, ‘a name so long I can hardly spell it' – which he proved, by misspelling it.

Merchant Ivory's next project, a short documentary called
The Delhi Way
(1964), made even less of a splash. Fifty minutes long, mostly shot years before, it was the pet project of director James Ivory, who had run out of money halfway through production. When the film finally came out, most of the critics failed to notice. It sank almost without trace.

In 1965, though, Merchant Ivory struck lucky. While making
The Householder,
its male star, Shashi Kapoor, had introduced Ivory to a family called the Kendals: an eccentric Anglo-Indian clan who doubled as an acting troupe called Shakespeareana. For twenty years, the Kendals had pounded the highways and byways of India, taking versions of Shakespeare to schools, convents, village squares, maharajas' palaces; anywhere that would cover their costs, from the North-West Frontier Province in what became Pakistan down to Travancore in the south. Geoffrey Kendal was paterfamilias and star actor – Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Antony. His wife Laura Liddell took the female leads, joined by their daughters Jennifer and Felicity, both practically brought up on stage. The family was complemented by a flexible cast of extras – some
English expats, others who became major names in Indian theatre and cinema: Kapoor himself, Utpal Dutt, Anwar Mirza, Marcus Murch.