A Groundling at the Globe

On this trip, we have seen two different shows at the Globe theater, and both of them created a completely different experience. For A Midsummer Night’s Dreams we sat off to the side of the stage for the more modern enactment of the play, where it was difficult to see, but the actors did a fine job of interacting with our side as well. For the second act of that play, I stood as a groundling, and that was a completely different experience. I had a lot more fun there than in the seats.

The second show we saw at the Globe was A Comedy of Errors. This was a closed captioning version of the show, so they had the words on screens on either side of the stage. I think it’s wonderful that they are making theater more accessible, but it was extremely distracting because I found myself watching the words instead of the actors, so I think it would have been better for me to see a different showing of the play. Our seats for this show, however, were right in front of the stage. Minus being in direct sunlight, it was one of the best views I think we could have gotten from the globe.

The play itself was done really well. The casting was also done so well that I couldn’t tell the “twins” apart for the first few acts. It definitely wasn’t what I was expecting because when we first read the play in class, I watched another production of a Comedy of Errors. When this version of it started, I was very confused because they started it off with a fight scene that I didn’t remember taking place, and I thought we were watching the wrong play. Once we got into the first actual scene I was back on track.

Overall, I enjoyed being at the Globe, and I’m glad I got to experience different productions from different views because you definitely pick up on different aspects of the story when you have different viewpoints. I think that A Midsummer Night’s Dream felt more like what it would’ve felt like during Shakespeare’s days because there were significantly more people filling the seats than there were at a Comedy of Errors. I think the people are what make parts of these productions so successful, and that’s the part we’re missing in some of the Shakespeare productions we do in America.

As a side note, I had a very entertaining long weekend. It was full of all the geeky stuff I enjoy taking part in back home, and it was a fun experience. This weekend I saw a total of three plays including The Phantom of the Opera, SIX, and The Play That Goes Wrong. They were all fantastic from the sets to the acting to the costumes, and the singing in the first two was phenomenal. I now have the goal to one day make enough money to sit in the box seats for Phantom of the Opera at His Majesty’s Theater because it was so amazing. I also found the TARDIS, went to 221B Baker St., went to The Beatles store, went to the Disney Store, and I went to the Warner Brother’s Harry Potter Studio Tour. I was there for over four hours (so you can imagine how much I enjoyed it), and I got a really cool architecture wand at the end. 🤓 I think it was a very successful and productive weekend.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time<3