From February until April, Auckland will become the first city in the world to host a full-scaled temporary pop-up replica of Shakespeare's famous Globe Theatre. Photo / Supplied
From February until April, Auckland will become the first city in the world to host a full-scaled temporary pop-up replica of Shakespeare's famous Globe Theatre. Photo / Supplied
The Pop-up Globe is one of the biggest theatrical events next year
In 2016, the world marks the 400th anniversary of the death of playwright William Shakespeare.
There will be grand commemorations overseas but right here, in Auckland, one of the most ambitious is planned; one of the biggest and most unusual theatrical events the city - possibly the world - has seen.
From February until April, Auckland will become the first city in the world to host a full-scale temporary pop-up replica of Shakespeare's famous Globe Theatre. The man behind the Pop-up Globe is New Zealand-born and British-trained Shakespeare scholar Dr Miles Gregory who says his young daughter gave him the idea. Research by Elizabethan theatre specialist Tim Fitzpatrick and technical director Russell Emerson from the the University of Sydney's theatre department has allowed the unique structure to be built.
The pop-up replicates exactly the dimensions of the second Globe Theatre built in 1614 after the first one was destroyed by fire in 1613, so has a different size and shape from the modern reconstruction of the original Globe in London's Bankside. The 100sq m stage means that no one in the 900-strong audience, whether standing or sitting, will ever be more than 15m from the stage in the three-storey-high donut-shaped building.
The two plays originally slated, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, have been extended to include local theatre-makers. Auckland University's Outdoor Summer Shakespeare production of The Tempest, starring Lisa Harrow as Prospero, will play there, while its director, Benjamin Henson, will re-stage his visceral interpretation of Titus. The Young Auckland Shakespeare Company's (YASC) Much Adoe about Nothing is now on the bill, as is a re-worked version of Antony and Cleopatra and an all-female Henry V, making the event the Southern Hemisphere's largest Shakespeare festival.
As Pop-Up Globe artistic director, Gregory will also direct an all-male version of Twelfth Night. There's another unexpected Auckland bonus for him: Auckland Library's Sir George Grey Special Collections has a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio so Gregory will base his Twelfth Night script on that version.
Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, one of only 233 believed to survive from the 750 to 1000 originally published in 1623. New Zealand's lone copy, bought by Sir George Grey specifically for the library in 1894, is one of just three in the Southern Hemisphere. It is intriguing to think where it might have been between 1623 and 1894.
Miles Gregory is artistic director and founder of Pop-Up Globe. Photo / Supplied
So precious is the First Folio (another copy fetched 2.5 million at Sotheby's in 2006) that there's an air of anticipation when it is brought out from its climate-controlled and burglar-alarmed home, carried on a soft pillow, in the white-gloved hands of Special Collections manager Georgia Prince.
"I knew it was here but I didn't think I would be allowed to see it or touch it," Gregory says.
"It's very rare for a modern production to use a script from the actual First Folio and I've certainly never had the opportunity to do it. At the heart of the work we do is the attempt to get as close to Shakespeare as you can and you can't get any closer than the First Folio.
"You read the manuscript looking for directorial clues and you interrogate the words and the lines and the way they have been written. Why is a word or a phrase in italics? What difference does the punctuation make to the way something may be read? Is capitalisation or the removal of a word important? It's about detective work."
Published seven years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, the First Folio was compiled by the playwright's former colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell who gathered together texts of 36 of his plays and took them to a printing shop run by father and son William and Isaac Jaggard. The Jaggards printed it as a folio, a printing term for a large-format book made by folding the printed sheets of papers just once.
Up until then, just 18 of the Bard's plays had been published in quarto format (made by folding a page in half twice, giving eight pages of text).
Without the efforts of these men, helped by bookseller Edward Blount, it is likely many of Shakespeare's plays would have been lost. That would leave us without, among others, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and Macbeth.
The $450,000 cost of building Pop-up Globe, behind Q and the Basement Theatres on Grey's Ave, comes from sponsorship, grants and ticket sales. Already sales are exceeding organisers' wildest imaginings, with 15,000 students from Whangarei to Christchurch, booked to attend.
Gregory, who has 20 years' international experience producing and directing theatre, says it's a testament to the enduring power of Shakespeare and his preternatural ability to observe and write about the human condition that his words still resonate.
"Shakespeare's words transport us to a different place and emotional state," he says. "It's like his words and observations of life have taken on a power greater than the constituent elements. It's been said that the Bible, probably the only other book in the English language with such reach, provides spiritual nourishment while Shakespeare supplies the intellectual nourishment."
He reads a passage from Shakespeare or one of his sonnets to his three preschool children every night. It was his daughter, Nancy, now 5, who gave him the idea of a Pop-up Globe. The pair were reading a pop-up book about the Globe Theatre when she asked if there was a pop-up Globe they could visit.
