It was announced yesterday that Emma Rice will step down as artistic director of the Globe theatre in 2018, the news coming less than a year after she took the helm, and just days after the Stage’s article about the disproportionate criticism her first season attracted.
The board’s decision to dispense with Rice so quickly is a huge shame for the many audience members who have enjoyed her all-too-short tenure. Even the Globe noted, in the very statement that announced her removal, that Rice’s work at the venue had attracted “new and diverse audiences, won huge creative and critical acclaim, and achieved exceptionally strong box-office returns”.
On her appointment, Rice was hailed by that same board as “an artist of vision, someone who will approach the Globe’s continued exploration of Shakespeare … with distinct clarity”. With queues for returns every day for her sold-out A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and drawing some of the most excited and engaged audiences the Globe has had, it’s hard not to feel Rice has been forced out for doing exactly what was asked of her, and exactly what they should have expected.
Her first season shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone familiar with her impressive oeuvre and extensive work with her own company, Kneehigh, which makes the theatre’s decision to oust her look suspiciously like a panicked response to the reactionary criticism she has received in some corners of the press. If this wasn’t what they wanted, why on earth did they appoint her? But this is about more than just an excellent theatremaker being forced out of a venue – after all, Rice is a mighty talent who will go on being brilliant somewhere else – and more even than the loss of a great female artistic directorship, although Rice’s tenure had been all the more exciting for how rare it is that theatre jobs such as this one go to women.
No, most miserable of all is the reason the theatre has given: “The Globe was reconstructed as a radical experiment to explore the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked … we have now concluded that a predominant use of contemporary sound and lighting technology will not enable us to optimise further experimentation in our unique theatre spaces and the playing conditions which they offer.”
So basically, she used too much historically inaccurate music and lighting. Is that really what you’re going with as a reason? “Too many bright colours and big sounds”?
The Globe may be getting rid of 'light and sound' but thank GOD they're keeping the authentic and historically accurate Shakespeare giftshop
— Joseph Kloska (@josklos) October 25, 2016
This decision looks like the Globe’s board choosing to honour one tradition over another: to honour their tradition of not having electric lights (because it was The Past) over their tradition of innovation and accessibility. Don’t tell me Shakespeare wasn’t an innovator: every time he needed a word for something and there wasn’t one yet he made one up. I expect he would’ve loved using lights and loud music if he hadn’t been born in the 16th century.
The “historical accuracy” drum is a strange one to bang, because the Globe’s board aren’t powerlessly recreating a historical experience, they’re deciding which parts of it matter most. And who are they upholding that tradition for, to the extent it’s been deemed more important than progress, excitement, greater accessibility? The sell-out season immediately preceding Rice’s removal suggests it isn’t being done for audiences – rather that the Globe wants to become, as Lyn Gardner has said, a museum, and not a theatre, which by necessity is something both live and alive.
In this country, we have a sense of tradition and history that is at times quite sweet, and at other times an insidious symptom of the kind of rose-tinted, backwards-looking ideas – we used to be great and we need to be great again – we buy into with such willing blindness that we’ve just tanked our own economy to prove a weird, idiotic point. Traditions can be beautiful and uniting, but they can also be used to say: this belongs to us and not to you. Tradition is inseparable from history, which is not an immutable truth, and from nostalgia – and we must be wary of nostalgia’s power to seduce and to corrode. We’re at risk of becoming a country in love with a mostly imagined idea of its own past.
Rice’s removal from the Globe is about more than just a director losing a job she was good at and had earned – although that would be enough. It throws up questions about for whom this work is being made, to whom theatres such as the Globe feel they should be speaking and to whom they belong. The commitment it shows to keeping things as they are, instead of allowing them to progress, has unfortunate parallels with the side effect of this kind of arrested development – namely that when things remain as they are, power tends to remain with the same small group of people. Would Rice have been so criticised if she had been a man? And if she had been, would the venue have abandoned her so readily? It doesn’t seem likely.