McCurdy’s confident of that: “I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t last for three or four hundred years.” And stepping inside will still be a thrill.This aerial photo shows a view of the Yangpu International Container Port in the Yangpu Economic Development Zone, south China's Hainan Province, May 26, 2021. The timber, by contrast, is standing up fine, shrinkage, cracks and all. That’s just what happens with thatch but, McCurdy says, “What everyone’s discovered – and hadn’t perhaps predicted – is that something in London’s atmosphere, whether chemicals or pollution I don’t know, is causing the thatch to deteriorate rather faster than it would out in the countryside.” Rather than a 40-60 year lifespan, it’s half that in London. Parts of the water reed thatch have already been replaced – the ridges and valleys, one or two entire roof slopes. As you look up, you get this change in colour from the bottom of the timbers, which are exposed to the weather and sun, to the underside of the thatch which aren’t.” Inside, it’s gone hues of reddy-orangey-brown. “On the outside, it’s generally oxidised to that typical silver-grey you see on oak fence posts and gates. The timber’s colour has changed too – in some places, unexpectedly so. Long cracks have since started to appear – harmless, but characterful. “It starts to stabilise and it tends to shrink.” Even by the time the building was being finished, four years after work began, some of the structure had shrunk slightly. “It will have gotten slightly harder,” McCurdy explains. Timber and thatch, to a lesser extent lime plaster and brick, are organic materials and, as McCurdy says, “Organic materials are on a very slow degrading process – a bit like the half-life of isotopes.” The moment you cut ‘green’ timber, it starts – very slowly – drying out a process that takes years and years. All are subtle ways of challenging the architecture.īut the Globe, by its very nature, is always changing. Designers have added extensions, wings and ramps – even erecting island platforms in the groundlings’ pit. If the main structure is, superficially at least, a relatively stubborn and fixed space, its configuration is all but fixed the stage offers possibilities. It has, however, given licence to designers in the years since. “You can take the plays out of the playhouse, but you can’t take the playhouse out of the plays.” They were written for this sort of theatrical space and, in some ways, their shapes and storytelling methods make most sense there. “All you have to do is drop the play in there and the basic features of it come to life,” Karim-Cooper says. It’s taught us plenty about the way theatre once was – what it means to watch plays as a fully visible audience why Shakespeare structured his plays as he did the register of performance the space demands the reactions it engenders. The Globe becomes a kind of living laboratory. Space itself, be they from actors, writers, costumiers or audiences. Shakespeare’s Globe opened, the mode of research has changed, taking a more phenomenological approach – that is, examining experiences of the Learning becomes a matter of looking at the shared properties between the two structures, the layout of the audience being the main one. With an approximate reconstruction, says Head of Research Farah Karim-Cooper, “there’s only so much we can learn about how Shakespeare did it.”
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