Abstract
When Shakespeare's Globe opened the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) in 2014 with a production of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, directed by Dominic Dromgoole and starring Gemma Arterton, reviews in the mainstream media focused at least as much on the playing space as they did on the performance itself. Michael Coveney's review of Malfi for WhatsOnStage, for example, described the theatre as ‘a 340-seater oaken bauble’ lit by ‘a myriad beeswax candles, affixed to the eleven elegant pillars and on six descendant steel chandeliers’ beneath ‘a painted ceiling of blue sky, clouds and plump little putti’ (Coveney). Similarly, writing for the Standard, Mark Douet proclaimed the SWP to be ‘a magical new space’ and forgave the theatre's ‘none too comfortable’ seating and ‘difficult’ sightlines by echoing Dromgoole's reminder that ‘Wanamaker's vision was of an incubator for experiment’ (Douet). The focus a decade ago on the SWP itself as a new venue is hardly surprising; but the language used to describe the space demonstrates how those experiencing the recreation of a seventeenth-century indoor theatre quickly placed it on a pedestal – perhaps the same ‘highbrow’ pedestal upon which they hoped to keep Shakespeare himself.
The Globe echoed the language of these reviews somewhat in advertising the SWP's 10th Anniversary Season for 2023–24, billed as ‘a season of intensely intimate and powerfully compelling drama, all told by the beautifully beguiling glow of candlelight’ (‘Sam Wanamaker’). Alongside productions of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, Shakespeare's Othello, and – in a callback to the SWP's inaugural production – Webster's Malfi, the season also featured a limited run of Tim Crouch's one-person play I, Malvolio, advertised as ‘[a] hilarious and often unsettling rant from an actor adrift in front of an audience, [which] re-imagines Twelfth Night from the point of view of its most notoriously abused steward’. Crouch has performed I, Malvolio worldwide since its premiere in 2010, but the play's run of seven performances at the end of 2023 marked his Globe debut (‘I, Malvolio’).
If the 10th Anniversary Season as a whole was content to reassert the SWP's position on the pedestal it has inhabited for the best part of a decade, then Crouch's intention – at least in part – appeared to be to give that same pedestal a considerable wobble. Crouch's approach to performing I, Malvolio within the SWP was subversive from the outset, adapting his play's inherent fourth-wall-breaking nature and audience interactivity to draw attention to the grandiose space and its candlelit finery in which he was performing. Crouch offered amusing impressions of non-specific patrons marvelling at the theatre – then, when actual audience members began looking around the space in response, he comically rebuked them for doing so. Addressing those sitting in the theatre's upper gallery, Crouch wryly observed that they likely couldn’t see the stage particularly well, then suggested they come down to fill some of the empty seats in the lower gallery. (They didn’t, at least not at the performance I attended.) Where Douet and other reviewers had excused away the SWP's less audience-friendly aspects ten years earlier, Crouch gleefully called attention to them – and to the audience's own willingness to sacrifice comfort and visibility to experience the very show he was performing.
Early in his performance, and in a description that will stay with me forever, Crouch declared the SWP to be the theatre equivalent of Jurassic Park: ‘We found the DNA of an indoor Jacobean playhouse preserved in amber … You know how Jurassic Park ends, though?’. The comparison drew one of the first big laughs from the audience during the performance I attended. As well as humour, however, it arguably also offered one of Crouch's sharpest insights into the introspective nature of staging I, Malvolio in the SWP, and of the absurdity of recreating a seventeenth-century playhouse as a twenty-first-century theatre venue, predominantly in the name of authenticity. As beautiful as the SWP is as a finely crafted performance space, turning Shakespeare into a delicate historical recreation to be experienced in quiet reverence risks reinforcing the exclusive divide as to who has access to his works. Crouch brilliantly worked against notions of theatrical snobbery, encouraging his audience to push against any sense of heightened etiquette the SWP might be imposing, and even co-opted the playhouse's distinctive candelabras at one point to undercut its potentially imposing nature. During a blackly comic sequence in the show, in which Malvolio attempts to throw a noose over a beam to hang himself, Crouch first requested for the candelabra nearest to him to be raised supposedly through concern for fire safety. As the wrong candelabra was raised and lowered again and again, the moment descended further and further into farcical comedy, drawing increasingly uproarious laughter from those in attendance, and any sense of decorum was duly punctured. There were moments elsewhere in the performance, however, where it was clear Crouch was having to work harder to get an audience response than he perhaps might have in a different setting – something he himself acknowledged openly – suggesting that the spell of the SWP's stately presence was never completely broken.
It's worth noting that, throughout much of the show, it was hard – if not impossible – to determine to what extent Crouch was in role as his version of Malvolio. The playtext indicates that Malvolio begins the show on-stage ‘glar[ing] at the audience as they enter [and] tak[ing] the measure of them’ (Crouch 2023: 9). This was the case in his SWP staging of I, Malvolio, and yet Crouch repeatedly told the audience ‘It hasn’t started yet’ as they made their way to their seats during the opening minutes of the performance. As Crouch was on stage in full costume as Malvolio as he said this, something undeniably had started, making his declaration inherently paradoxical. As Crouch pointed out, however, the first lines of I, Malvolio as scripted are the same phrase – ‘I am not mad’ – spoken three times (Crouch 2023: 9). Indeed, Crouch literally pointed out the printed script – held open by one audience member in the front row of the pit to follow the performance – as confirmation of this, cranking the metatheatricality of this version of the show up a few extra notches from the outset.
Moments such as this demonstrated that Crouch was aware many in the audience were not seeing I, Malvolio for the first time, and he wilfully strayed from delivering a textbook performance of the play (if such a thing even exists) throughout much of the 75 minutes he was on stage. Individual sections of the play were connected by Crouch through sequences that felt part stand-up comedy, part observational improv. Crouch's significant blurring of the line between performer and role allowed him to push the envelope in terms of his continuous ribbing of audience members coming to the SWP expecting to experience ‘high culture’ but being presented with Crouch's irreverent one-person show. Whilst such audience members were largely fictitious, Crouch made reference towards the end of the performance to a few audience members who were clearly not enjoying I, Malvolio, although he respectfully refrained from identifying them explicitly. Whether these audience members actually existed, or whether they were just another element of Crouch's blurring of fiction and reality, they nonetheless contributed further to his masterful roast of the SWP as it turns ten years old. In bringing I, Malvolio to the candlelit playhouse, Crouch offered a welcome reminder that, whilst venues such as the SWP are beautiful in their craftsmanship, theatre is created by performers and audiences, not the physical spaces they inhabit. Encouraging passive and reverential reception keeps theatre on a pedestal that is inherently inaccessible for a great many people. Whilst I’m glad to have the opportunity to experience theatre in the SWP, Crouch's wobbling of its pedestal helped ground the venue's 10th Anniversary Season with a wry yet sincere reality check.