A premature follow up

There is a depressing if predictable irony to the fact that, within hours of this article being completed, the Globe’s board went and pushed out their female artistic director. On Tuesday morning, it was announced that Emma Rice will be stepping down from her role in April 2018, following the close of the 17/18 season.

Not only this, but with Rice goes “the current nature of work, which has characterised the period since Emma assumed the position”. That is to say, all of the modernising (new lights and actual sound system), the shaking up and reinventing of the texts, it’s all going away in April 2018.

This decision has been dressed up as a decision purely about the intended purpose of the Globe vis a vis Shakespeare and his original productions – “a radical experiment to explore the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked”, as the board’s statement put it. Such a claim – coming as it does with remarks that future programming “should be structured around ‘shared light’ productions without designed sound and light rigging” – feels an awful lot like window-dressing for a sadly backwards attitude from the Globe.

Within hours of this article being completed, the Globe’s board went and pushed out their female artistic director

This is all despite acknowledging that the “mould-breaking work” of Rice had achieved “strong box office returns”, which is no mean feat in a theatre like the Globe, which sells about 90% of the available tickets as standard, and the new, diverse audiences being attracted there.

Fundamentally, while the Globe’s board may have a point in there somewhere – specifically the one about being founded to explore the original circumstances of Shakespeare – this can’t help but feel like a mixture of a complete cock-up and a missed opportunity. The board inescapably knew what they were getting when they appointed Rice – you don’t appoint an artistic director without coming to some kind of agreement on their vision for a theatre. To back down now, like this, is just cowardly and pathetic.

And that’s all before you get into the fact that Rice is – was – one of few female artistic directors in the country, and one in charge of Shakespeare’s Globe at that. You couldn’t have made a better statement about how theatre – all theatre – is for everyone, of all genders, at a time when it feels like theatre might finally be moving towards redressing the balance.

Now, of course, that statement just starts to feel like maybe theatre is the small-minded, boys-only club everyone thought it might be.