Theatre review: The Bible at Shakespeare’s Globe

Yesterday I headed down to the Globe Theatre to see part of the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Translation of the Bible which began on Good Friday and finishes on Easter Monday.

Perhaps the first thing to note is that I didn’t see quite the portion of the Bible that I had planned to.  I arrived at 4:30 pm expecting the beginning of Ezekiel after a short break.  I quickly realised, however, that we were in Jeremiah 33.  I don’t know how things got so far behind but Ezekiel didn’t begin until after 6:30.  I had to leave at 11:30 to be sure of getting home, at which point Hosea had just been completed.  Goodness knows what time they reached the end of Malachi, and how many people were left in the audience.

But that’s by the by.  This commemoration is a good idea, and I was not disappointed with the execution of it.  There were four speakers reading reciting speaking a chapter each in turn, and all four were changed every so often – I saw three sets in total, one which finished at the end of Lamentations, a second which went through Ezekiel and Daniel and a third which began at the start of Hosea.  The crossing out above is because, as I hope can be seen from the video below, the speakers were not reading but not reciting either – they were being prompted by headphones.  For the most part this worked very well, although there were occasions on which the speaker misheard the beginning of a word or tripped over a barrage of numbers in ancient measuring systems, but these are very minor complaints.

Ezekiel 47:1-6, performed by Andrew Havill

This set-up of rotating speakers had its advantages and disadvantages.  It was great to see the words of the Bible performed in different ways: RP accents and regional ones, declamatory styles and emotive ones, gesticulating and wandering around the stage (and even, in one case, into the audience), male and female voices.  This meant that, if one style of performance didn’t get you, another certainly would (although all the speakers were good, even if I naturally had my preferences).  However, at some points this lead to a degree of unwelcome unevenness as speaker would switch mid-passage.

It was also great to be able to take in so much Scripture at once, as in doing so I caught onto parallels I perhaps hadn’t before, or only slightly: hearing Daniel refer to Jeremiah having just heard Jeremiah a couple of hours beforehand, the shifting attitudes from pre- to mid-exile, the sheer obstinate persistence of Israel’s idolatry, and the reoccurrence of evocative phrases like ‘the day of your visitation’ and references to heifers.  Of course, those last two parallels depend on the KJV translation, which was the point of the occasion!  I found it easy enough to keep up with the Jacobean English for the most part, particularly sections I know well, although of course some passages were easier to follow than others.  The whole audience was particularly captivated by the performance of chapters 1-6 of Daniel.

If I hadn’t had to leave because of transportation issues, I would have stayed to the end; the seven hours I was there seemed to fly by.  If you have the time to go tomorrow or on Friday then I recommend it.