[In the following excerpted review of The Two Noble Kinsmen, directed by Tim Carroll for the Globe Theater, Potter comments on the director's excising of the text, noting that Carroll valued simplicity over spectacle.]

The Globe season of 2000 paired two famous Shakespeare plays about madness, metatheatricality, and exotic travel (Hamlet and The Tempest) with two rarities: a Fletcher-Shakespeare collaboration (The Two Noble Kinsmen), whose most popular character has always been an Ophelia-like madwoman; and The Antipodes, a Brome comedy of the next generation about the cure of a hero who has gone mad from reading travel literature. Whether these interconnections were intended or merely the product of casting needs and directorial schedules, the result was a season of unusual coherence, though, at the same time, each play could be enjoyed on its own terms. Even if metatheatricality had not been a theme of the plays, it would have been a theme of the season, since the Globe rarely fails to make one conscious of its ongoing experimentation with the relationship between actors and audience.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, directed by Tim Carroll, was the second production by the Red Company—without Vanessa Redgrave but with Yolanda Vasquez, who joined the company to play Hippolyta. Carroll trimmed the play not only of lines (particularly Shakespearean ones) but also of scenes (much of 1.1 and the whole of 1.2, which seems to have been a late decision) and of characters. The disappearance of the three knights who are supposed to support Palamon and Arcite in their combat meant that the heroes addressed to us, not to their followers, the speeches in the temple and (in Palamon's case) on the scaffold—a breaking of the dramatic illusion which the Chaucerian part of the play does not normally allow. At first viewing, I wondered how well the audience could understand what was going on, but I was in the yard on the second occasion and felt a remarkable degree of warmth toward the production. People were of course understanding what was there, not wondering about what wasn't. Though Carroll cut what he found boring, he did not remove what was merely difficult. Thus, Palamon retained his lines about the eighty-year-old man and his young bride, and Pirithous had most of his great final speech about the horse that goes mad. Moreover, the lines that did remain were given their full value, with, for example, beautiful orchestration of voices at antiphonal moments, as in 3.6 when Hippolyta, Emilia, and Pirithous were asking mercy for Palamon and Arcite.

While most productions of this play go on the assumption that it was meant to be spectacular, Carroll opted for extreme simplicity. The “signs” given by the gods in the temple scene (5.1), for instance, were simple and unspectacular (a brief flare-up of flame for Arcite, smoke for Palamon, and, for Emilia, a rose whose petals crumble in her hand). The one scenic device was a structure suggesting a crude siege tower or catapult, topped with the giant skull of a horse and a tail. At times, it recalled the Greek theater's ekkyklema, a rolling platform apparently used to reveal characters who were unable to enter under their own power: the half-dead kinsmen were first seen lying at its base in 1.4. But it could also be representational: the prison of the kinsmen or a maypole in the morris-dance scene, with red streamers emerging from its mouth. As something primitive and incomprehensible, like Peter Shaffer's Equus, it represented the three gods who are addressed in the temple scene. In the final scene it became both Palamon's scaffold and, by a turn as sudden as that of the story, the place where Arcite lay dying. It towered over Pirithous as he gave his famous speech, powerfully delivered by Jonathan Oliver, whose slow and precise treatment of the climax left no doubt about exactly what had happened and how horrendous it was.

Because Carroll chose to cut 1.2, Jasper Britton and Will Keen, as Palamon and Arcite, first appeared in the prison scene, which was well balanced between idealism and egotism: Palamon's reaction to Arcite's declaration of love for Emilia—“I saw her first”—was so perfectly timed that it got not only laughter but applause for the neatness with which it followed the vows of eternal friendship the two men had just been exchanging. Both characters easily established a good relationship with their audience—though I saw a few ominous signs that Britton might be planning to introduce more of the show-stealing behavior that had worked for his Caliban: there was a little too much giggling in 3.3 where the two men drink to “the wenches we have known” and the laughter at “How do I look?” in 3.6 where they arm each other for a fight that they don't really want nearly overpowering the pathos of the situation. But the remarkable mixture of comic and tragic in their relationship and its consequences was probably better judged than I have ever seen it before.

It helped that other characters treated them with sympathy. Martin Turner was an unusually likeable and attractive Theseus, fully conscious of the cost of war (here made visible by the body bags for the three kings). When in 1.4 he announced his intention of posting back to Athens, the tone in which he named the city evoked not only Hippolyta's presence there but the extent to which Athens represented something valuable, the complete opposite of bloodstained, warlike Thebes. He was himself aware, rather than a butt, of the irony in his situation, as he was forced to modify his principles in the light of one complicated dilemma after another: “And, by my honour—once again—it stands.” Carroll brought out his three-way relationship with Hippolyta and Pirithous (he danced with both of them in the forest), and Emilia's simple, lyrical speech about her eleven-year-old love for another girl, beautifully spoken by Geraldine Alexander, suggested that bisexuality was a natural state in the world of Athens. Emilia's reluctance to marry either kinsman was fully understandable in the context of her Amazonian background, which was more emphasized than usual. She kicked off her shoes with relief at the beginning of the garden scene (2.2) and put them on with reluctance in 4.2 when told to go meet her suitors.

The director intelligently gave Palamon a brief snatch of song at his first appearance to explain why the Jailer's Daughter later refers to his singing, and the young woman (who is never named) echoed it later, when she had gone mad for love of him. In this notoriously show-stealing role, which includes three consecutive soliloquies, Kate Fleetwood played to the whole house effectively but was admirably disciplined in avoiding the temptation to exploit her relationship with the audience. The fact that her madness made her so miserable gave her as much in common with Hamlet as with Ophelia and kept the part from becoming an occasion for cheap laughs about sex-starved women. Paul Chahidi, playing the wooer who impersonates Palamon out of a desperate desire to cure the Daughter's madness, said in a post-performance talk that the actors themselves had had no idea how the audience would take the play and were surprised at how many laughs they got. The basic question about all Fletcherian drama—“Just how funny is it supposed to be?”—is still being answered in different ways by different directors. This production was probably the most completely satisfactory that I have seen, though admittedly some of its success was the result of knowing what to cut. Despite its simplicity, it achieved some fine effects, as when the fragile beauty of the solo voice in the opening wedding song was followed by a chorus, placed all round the second gallery, scattering paper petals over the wedding party as it entered through the yard. This procession was appropriately mirrored in Arcite's funeral procession at the end, which took all the characters out of the yard; the Jailer's Daughter and her Wooer brought up the rear, garlanded for their wedding but sufficiently serious and perturbed to leave open the question of her recovery.