[In the following excerpt, Potter favorably reviews the 2001 staging of King Lear at the Globe Theatre, noting that the production “generally felt ‘right,’ both simple and to the point.”]

It was something of a letdown to find that in 2001 “Shakespeare's Globe” was to be only “Shakespeare's Globe,” gesturing toward other dramatists only in playreadings that were fewer and less well-advertised than in previous years (at least, this is my explanation for my failure to get to any of them). Two thousand and one was also the year when, for some reason, the company apparently agreed not to treat the Globe as a set in its own right but to use it as if it were any other theater, apart from the fact that it happened to have a couple of big pillars on its stage. Perhaps they were tired of reading reviews that described their productions as antiquarian. At any rate, all the directors seem to have been encouraged to do whatever they liked to conceal the fact that they were performing on a reconstructed Renaissance stage. Barry Kyle, whose program note observes that King Lear does not seem much like a “Globe play,” converted the baroque tiring-house front into a stockade located in some outpost of empire. Mike Alpers's Cymbeline kept the set simple, apart from hanging the back wall with percussion instruments. … Macbeth (directed by Tim Carroll) used a descending platform that variously became a table and a place for staging tableaux as well as the sleepwalking scene. Although the three plays had three different directors and designers (in the case of Cymbeline only a “Master of Costumes and Props”), they shared music by Clare van Kampen. Her achievement was remarkable, since the three scores—lushly classical for Lear, new-age percussion for Cymbeline, and jazz/swing for Macbeth—were as prominent as they were varied. …

For reasons never explained, the theater's basic repertory of Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline was called the “Celtic season.” Although there are Celts in all three plays—the duke of Albany, the entire cast of the Scottish play, and (at least by adoption) the Cambrians of Milford Haven—nothing in any of the three productions looked or sounded particularly Celtic: the six actors in Cymbeline wore uniform white shirts and trousers …, King Lear vaguely evoked prerevolutionary Russia …, and the Macbeths and their friends wore tuxedos. … Accents were miscellaneous regional ones, not the woodnotes wild of the Celtic fringe. Some aspects of the décor, particularly the “foliage” hanging along the galleries, may have been meant to suggest the green world of the Celts; but the little electric lightbulbs among the leaves were more reminiscent of the Jacobean masque, with its garish lighting. … “Jacobean” would in fact have been a better description of the season, since England's Scots king, the first to advocate the adoption of the name Great Britain, did much to create the uneasy awareness of cultural diversity that dominates the present-day semi-united kingdom.

The earliest Jacobean play, King Lear, owed much of its success to the fact that it was the most audible production I've yet heard at the Globe. Sheer audibility is an underrated component of good acting, almost as important as the ability to make oneself listened to. Barry Kyle's cast completely disproved the widespread view that attention at the Globe must always be dispersed. The rich, almost filmic musical background, which gave intimations of Lear's approaching madness and supplied all the sounds of the storm, also enabled one to hear the characters against this background instead of drowning out their words. John McEnery's Fool, who carried a tiny banjo-like instrument, made one aware of how much music there is in this play, a fact that made his departure even more regrettable than usual. Curiously but effectively, the lush music illustrated a primitivist set and action, paralleling the text's disjunction between poetry and cruelty. The few props used in the production were hung on the wall, Shaker-style. They were large and crudely made. One was a throne, the symbol of Lear's position: the knights carried it with them on Lear's perambulations until, with his departure from Goneril's house, it became an encumbrance. Another was like a larger version of the stocks: a sort of bench with two holes in it, enabling Edgar to lead his father. Lear and the Fool were roped together in the storm; later, the Fool's hanging body was revealed behind the central doors at the end of the mad trial scene—one of the rare cases in recent productions where Lear's “my poor fool is hanged” turned out to be literally true. Goneril led a blindfolded Edmund onto the stage, either in mockery of Gloucester's blindness or as a gesture toward blind Cupid. The ties that bind were also the nooses that kill.

The costumes variously suggested Brueghel and Eastern Europe of about 1900; in the midst of the yard was a pole with a wheel on the top, resembling the strange gallows structures that dominate Brueghel's “Triumph of Death”. … If, as most audience members thought, this engine also represented the wheel of fortune, it was appropriate that Edmund and Edgar, who refer to it at the end of the play, were the characters who climbed it: Edmund at the beginning of the play and during his soliloquy on nature and Edgar at the point when he decided to play Poor Tom. Its positioning in the yard might also have been a reminder of more esoteric associations, since the audience could likewise be seen as the ultimate arbiters of fortune. It was thus appropriate that Edmund asked them which of the sisters he should take, though on the night I went no one gave him an answer, as apparently happened at some performances. People seemed genuinely involved in the story and reluctant to hold it up.

The production seemed, for all its accomplishment, rather dry at the beginning. This might have been simply because my concentration was disturbed by worries over whether the two small children in the row ahead were going to be traumatized by the blinding of Gloucester. But it was also built into the trajectory of the characters. Both Julian Glover's Lear and Geoffrey Whitehead's Gloucester were low-key and matter-of-fact at the beginning. They showed little grief at the discovery of their children's apparent betrayal, dispensing orders and punishments without hesitation; we felt equally little for them. During the second half (when I stood among the groundlings in the yard, away from the small children) these two old men appeared to develop a capacity to feel pain, something that seemed in this context like an achievement. This was a production that generally felt “right,” both simple and to the point. The Quarto text (sometimes supplemented with readings from the Folio on the basis of rehearsal experience) often worked much better than one would have expected, precisely because the actors clearly saw a meaning even in their oddest lines. …

The three “Celtic” productions were completely self-contained, played as they were by three different companies (Red, White, and Rose) with no cross-casting. There were probably financial and scheduling reasons for this arrangement. I have often found it enjoyable to see actors performing in several roles and to observe thematic links between plays, but I realize that most people don't see the entire season, and that there is little point in setting up a schedule for the benefit of English professors. Though the eclectic mix of production styles frequently made me feel that I might as well have been at the Royal Court or the Barbican, all the productions did retain one unique aspect of the Globe, its special relationship with the audience. Thanks to the improved audibility, it was a more focused relationship; it was also more controlled than in earlier years, which may not be a bad thing for the time being. I hope the theater made lots of money from its all-Shakespeare season—because then the artistic directors may decide that they can again afford to put on the unpredictable and unprofitable plays by non-Shakespearean dramatists.