On the day I met John Blondell to talk about the upcoming citywide celebration of Shakespeare he has organized, the contemporary Shakespeare world had been rocked by news of the abrupt dismissal of Emma Rice from her position as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. After only a single very successful season, Rice was sacked, ostensibly for introducing stage lights and amplified sound to the Globe, which is a modern replica of the Elizabethan theater in which many of Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed. Under the banner of a strict “shared light” policy — a concept that limits shows at the Globe to lighting that, like natural daylight, falls evenly on audience and actors alike — the board of the theater chose to remove a popular and innovative theater artist whose tenure had barely begun. Since then, the press in England and elsewhere has roundly criticized the move, seeing it as a decision driven by conservative aesthetics rather than a concern for preserving some specific form of interaction between the theater’s players and its patrons.
I mention the Rice controversy because it was the first thing that Blondell brought up in our conversation, but also because it reflects something about the atmosphere in which this weekend’s celebration of Shakespeare@400 will take place. The connection between the audience and the actors onstage will be remarkably immediate in all four of the live presentations involved in this mini-festival, and, with all due respect for the board of the Globe, it’s got very little to do with “shared light.”
Like Emma Rice, Blondell and his Lit Moon cohort — augmented this weekend by the actors of the Bitola (Macedonia) National Theatre — are innovators; they bring to bear the widest imaginable array of theatrical devices when facing the challenge of bringing Shakespeare’s work to life in the 21st century. “It’s about unlocking the people involved — releasing their spirits,” Blondell told me, going on to say that he takes stock of the “performers first” and looks for “what is unique about that person” when he casts a show. It’s through getting to know his actors extremely well that the director forms the bond of trust and the shared focus that allows a cast to not just say the words or act the parts, but to truly “live onstage.” Once this initial bond has been created, said Blondell, “we rehearse the play in order to discover together the nature of that living.”