The Storm at the Globe

so clever, so silly, so funny, so friendly and such huge fun..but rather hard to describe..

it was a piece of comedy more than a piece of theatre.. a parody of greek/roman comedy (Plautus play about prostitutes) that was deliberately littered with jokes, absurdities and anachronisms.

There were also hundreds of knowing collusions between the players and the audience. Over the top melodramatic speeches punctured by winks, Apologetic shrugs at awful puns.. corpsing, knocking over bits of scenery, It really made use of the fact that at the globe the audience and the performers are really close to each other and can connect.. Mark Rylance is superbly good at it but all the performers got to step out of character and joke with the audience. And it always worked.. we were laughing from the moment Rylance came on in a toga, wellies and a plastic wig right up to the final curtain call where one of the performers was permanently obscured under a giant amphora.

it was over two and half hours long, packed with brilliant one-liners (all of which i’ve forgotten ) but also with many, many allusions to the original greek, to shakespeare and an exhibition of the sheer verbal inventiveness of the playwright (with almost certainly a fair bit of improvisation from the cast)

if it was on again i’d go back and see at least a couple more times.

For the benefit of those that know, imagine the speed and verbal glee of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, combined with the exhuberent stupidity and physical inventiveness of Peepolykus and the comic charm and polish of The Right Size. It was as good as that.

instead, i am off back tonight to see a Winter’s Tale

About caspar

Caspar is just one monkey among billions. Battering his keyboard without expectations even of peanuts, let alone of aping the Immortal Bard. By day he is an infantologist at Birkbeck Babylab, by night he runs BabyLaughter.net
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