Worlds Elsewhere (32 page)

‘Cast' and ‘die'; Richard even had the lingo. It wasn't hard to see how these words would reverberate with gambling men stranded in their own ‘field'. Even his desperate final wager, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!', must have had an eerily authentic ring.

And nineteenth-century American actors knew how to hold an audience, no matter who or where they were. The poet Walt Whitman
remembered seeing Edwin Booth's father, the famously volatile Junius Brutus, as Richard III, and never forgot the experience. This is his account of Booth's tent scene near the end of the play, where Richard is visited on the eve of battle by the ghosts of everyone he has killed:

There was another tale about Junius Brutus Booth: that one of his favourite stunts on tour, half-wild on booze, was refusing to die at Bosworth – he would simply pursue his opponent off the stage and on to the street. Audiences must have adored that impromptu rescripted end.

The Canadian critic Russell M. Brown once suggested that the grounding model for much American fiction was Oedipus, the hot-headed, club-footed runaway who murdered his father, as America had fought its way to independence from Britain. (The model for Canada, by contrast, was the timidly father-worshipping Telemachus.) I wondered if another fine archetype mightn't be Shakespeare's Crookback: the villainous victor, the ultimate go-getting, self-reliant, self-made man.

THE FIRST CALIFORNIAN GOLD RUSH
was over in the blink of an eye: done and dusted by 1856, when the amateurs packed up and either moved on to other rushes elsewhere (British Columbia, Nevada, eventually the Klondike) or retreated back home with their tails between their legs. After the 1850s, gold mining was the specialism of large conglomerates. The great levelling dream that had brought so many to California – that anyone with a pan and a golden glint in their eye could strike it lucky – rang increasingly hollow. In 1854, San Francisco was thrown into panic by a drop-off in gold production. Banks went bust and a third of the city's businesses closed their doors.

Shakespeare went bust, too, in a more roundabout fashion. The
frail combination of circumstances that had seen thousands of miners hooting at
Richard III
and
Hamlet
in tiny tarpaper settlements passed. Communities either evolved into small, tough mining villages dominated by the companies, or else vanished off the face of the earth. Theatres closed, and the work for travelling actors shrank; fewer and fewer came to do tours in California, instead heading for more profitable gigs elsewhere. Some performers decided to make a new life out west. Others simply returned from whence they'd come.

That isn't to say the curtain came down on Californian drama: it was the reverse. Many theatres survived the bitter recession of the mid-1850s, but by drastically trimming their sails. The taste for cast-heavy Shakespeare was expensive. Cheaper entertainment – melodeons and music halls, vaudeville, variety acts – became the norm. Theatres that had hosted great dramas of race such as
Othello
and
The Merchant of Venice
now preferred minstrel shows: inexpensive, popular, reliably profitable. More hearteningly, San Francisco's jumble of cultures played its part. Chinese-language theatre, serving one of the city's largest immigrant communities, planted a foothold in 1855 when the Shanghai Theatre Company set up permanent shop on Dupont Street, the first Asian troupe to do so.

Perhaps there was a touch of Levine's highbrow/lowbrow, too: as the nineteenth century wore on, it began to be accepted in America, as in Britain, that Shakespeare deserved special treatment. Texts were sanitised, performance practices changed. The Bard was increasingly regarded as a subject for reverential study, to be examined in the cloistered hush of libraries and gentlemen's clubs, or in lumbering picturesque productions. Henry Irving's
Hamlet,
which toured the East Coast and Canada from London in 1883, lasted a punishing five-plus hours and required a cast of sixty and several tonnes of scenery. No chance of getting that up to the mountains, even if there had been an audience.

But Shakespeare did not change everywhere. Down in San Diego, my final destination, I thought I'd found a holdout of a rougher, ruder kind of theatre, one that had lasted long into the twentieth century and beyond. From all that I'd read, it was still going strong.

In the late summer of 1934, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce put on a show. Deep in the Great Depression, the town needed to liven up
its moribund economy. The Chicago World's Fair, then coming to an end, gave the city fathers an idea – their own world's fair, right here in Southern California.

It required eight months of round-the-clock building and a hefty chunk of federal money. But when it opened in Balboa Park the following May, the California Pacific International Exposition was a wonder to behold. You could watch astonished as a life-sized robot called Alpha ambled across the grounds and fired a pistol on command. You could marvel at the Ford Building, a futuristic concrete cylinder designed to resemble a V8 engine. You could visit the House of Pacific Relations, a collection of cottages in different national styles, or explore the ‘Indian village', complete with rattlesnake pit. The Gold Rush, naturally enough, made an appearance: there was a twenty-one-acre funfair called the Gold Gulch Mining Camp, complemented by (as
Time
put it) ‘an old-time saloon, ogling dance-hall gals and some bearded characters in hickory shirts splashing in a muddy wallow with pans'.

Much the greatest attraction at the exposition, at least in some quarters, was the Zoro Garden nudist colony, at which women and some men – hired performers rather than actual nudists – gambolled around in G-strings and played volleyball in the mild Pacific air. Visitors could pay for admission, or simply hoick up their Panama hats and gawp through holes in the fence. By the time the exposition closed in September 1935, nearly 4.8 million visitors had come through. Flushed with unexpected success, the Chamber of Commerce did it all again the following year.

Here, among the rattlesnakes, next to the nudist colony, was William Shakespeare. Taking their cue, again, from Chicago, where one of the most popular exhibits – much to the organisers' surprise – had been a ‘Merrie England' replica of the Globe, the San Diego organisers decided to raise a replica of that replica in Balboa Park. Theirs would be more authentic: the weather being balmier, they could get away without a roof.

The Old Globe, as the new one was known, was staffed by a team of bright-eyed acting graduates paid a pittance to perform streamlined versions of nineteen plays. Each afternoon, commencing at 1 p. m., the players would come on to the open-air thrust stage and race through cut-down ‘tabloid' versions of five or six texts, each a maximum of an hour long, with ten-minute intervals in between. There was no scenery; each actor played as many as six different roles a day. Elizabethan costumes were compulsory, and for one photocall the
Globe Players acted out an historical banquet with an actress got up as Gloriana herself. Audiences dined more modestly, at 85 cents a plate, at the Falstaff Tavern next door.

No one expected Shakespeare to survive in San Diego. The theatre was little more than a circular wooden frame boarded over and painted in mock-Elizabethan style; it had been jerry-built with so little regard to the weather that an awning had to be rigged up to prevent audiences collapsing from heat exhaustion. When the exposition finally came to an end in 1936, the authorities prepared to tear it down.

But fans had other ideas. A committee to preserve the Old Globe, and rebuild it along less disposable lines, was formed. Their target was $15,000, with half the funding coming from the city and labour provided free by Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. An appeal went out for San Diegans to find the remaining $7,500. Donations, many just one or two dollars, flooded in. A few months later, in winter 1937, the Old Globe was pronounced saved.

My motel was opposite the white cliff-face of a military facility belonging to Lockheed Martin, on a roaring six-lane highway: hardly territory for a quiet stroll. But I was feeling antsy after a week in a car, so I got the taxi to drop me downtown and decided to walk the last couple of miles.

Even mid-morning, the heat was punishing. Beige-coloured asphalt wavered in the sun. I quickly realised that the neat grid of my tourist map had been hiding something: San Diego was built across a series of canyons, which wound and dipped beneath the city like crazy paving. Laurel Street, which had started so reasonably on the straight and level, had developed a bad case of the inclines.

At long last, I dragged myself across the roadway bridge into Balboa Park. Beneath me, cars thundered through the canyon. Every few minutes, a jet bound for the airport, its undercarriage and flaps trailing untidily, shrieked overhead.

Hemmed in by a screen of palm trees and miraculously insensible to the noise, the San Diego Lawn Bowling Club were just polishing off a game: nut-brown seniors in baseball caps and high socks, neat little tummies protruding over their shorts. They looked rapt in concentration, like figures in an eighteenth-century landscape.

Seasick in the heat, I began to see things. Above the trees,
shimmering woozily in the haze, was a campanile. As I trudged through a Renaissance-style gatehouse, there sprang up a fantasy of baroque tracery, pilasters and ornamental columns in Spanish colonial style. This surreal mirage wasn't early symptoms of heat exhaustion, after all: it was the California Building, constructed for an earlier exposition.

The Old Globe was tucked around the corner, behind a walled garden. Given that I'd only seen pictures of the thimble-sized 1930s original, its scale took me aback. It was perhaps 40 metres wide, seated 600 people, with a broad courtyard out front and a gable-ended pavilion next door. With a jaunty tiled roof where thatch should have been and an air-conditioned indoor stage, it put the ‘mock' firmly into ‘Tudor'. (Indeed, the Old Globe isn't even a globe: only half the theatre is round.) But it looked cheery enough, with its mullioned windows and its half-timbering. After the California Building, it seemed positively restrained.

In a meeting room inside, the Old Globe's official historian, Darlene Gould Davies, told me its story; she had witnessed much of it herself, having arrived in San Diego in 1951, a theatre-crazy eleven-year-old. As an actor, her first main-stage show had been at the age of thirteen, she said. ‘Opposite Dennis Hopper!'

Like the Nevada theatre, the Old Globe had a fiery past. Reborn as a permanent theatre in December 1937, it had been destroyed by an arsonist in 1978. It rose once more and reopened in 1982, whereupon calamity struck a second time when the temporary stage that had been used in the meantime was also burnt down. The Old Globe in which we were sitting was in fact rather new, having been remodelled in 1995.

There were now three theatres: the main house, a studio space and the outdoor festival theatre, which is where I would be seeing a show tonight. From its humble origins, the Old Globe now ran a summer Shakespeare festival, in addition to a year-round programme that made it one of the linchpins of West Coast theatre. Each year some 200,000 people came to the Old Globe, 50,000 of them to see a play by Shakespeare.

I was interested in the movement the Old Globe and its Chicago predecessor had started. Courtesy of the eccentric but visionary British theatre-maker William Poel (1852–1934), attempts to recreate Elizabethan staging techniques had been going on since at least 1881. I'd run into Poel's shade in Gdańsk, because of his staging of
Der Bestrafte Brudermord,
that wildly modified early German version of
Hamlet.
Decades before that experiment, Poel attempted something almost as extraordinary – an original-practices production of the ‘bad' first quarto of Shakespeare's play itself (the text that features lines such as ‘To be or not to be, ay, there's the point'), in Elizabethan costume and with Elizabethan music. Poel spent the rest of his career trying to convert numerous theatres into temporary Globes after London County Council, regarding him as a dangerous obsessive, refused his request for a site on which to build a permanent one. Experiments continued in mainland Europe in 1889, when a Hungarian director named Jocza Savits built a platform out from the proscenium arch and over the orchestra pit in a theatre in Munich.

In America, however, the interest in replicas, like the interest in First Folios, properly took flight. Shakespearian Globes became must-have accessories at no fewer than four world's fairs of the 1930s: Chicago, Dallas, San Diego and Cleveland in Ohio. There are now at least nine dotted across the US, of varying degrees of authenticity.