by Eva Griffith 30/4/2022
I started this article on St. George’s Day, 23rd April, which happens to be Shakespeare’s birthday. As I started it, I sat near where the 1599 Globe playhouse (Shakespeare’s theatre) was located, opposite the new Globe reconstruction. I was about to eat Turkish food.
This makes sense to me, as the night before, the 22nd, I was reminded by a ‘Professor’ that St. George came from Cappadocia and Cappadocia is in Turkey. Beautiful Turkey seems constantly caught between its current-day Muslim identity and its extraordinary contribution to a Western, Christian history and Culture. Included in this mix is the Roman-soldier/dragon-slayer person that would not give up his Christian faith, not for a wilderness of monkeys. What a pleasing muddle. What an irony that England’s patron saint came from there. It is appropriate in some strangely curdled way.
The actor, Alan David, who plays the ‘Professor’ in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, a play I re-visited for its final preview of this airing, spoke the speeches most relevant to my research, although everyone and everything lent me a connection. He talked of fairs and puppet shows, bears and dogs. And of St. George. The actor reminded me of my father. David, in this play, represents a Welsh academic in a suit. I have talked of Welshmen in suits before. David’s Professor is the character who knows; Rylance’s is the character who is.
The last time I saw this play was in New York the first time it was produced, and I was so astounded by Mark Rylance’s performance that I stayed behind to stand, waiting, up to my ankles in snow, across the road from the Stage Door just to see him come out. I had to make sure he was real. The wait seemed like hours. He never did emerge from that Stage Door… I would say Rylance has matured into Johnny Byron now. He still astounds me. Mackensie Crook again played ‘Ginger’, a very subtle commentator in the play, situated midway between Byron and the ‘young’ people who congregate around the train carriage where he lives, parked in the middle of a wood. Just like the first time I saw it, the curtain call saw an immediate standing ovation. It is past its first night now, I can only wish it well for the rest of its magic run.
‘Well’, of course, is my operative word. In my last article for Lemon Shakespeare, I wrote about entertainment’s need for refreshment, borne out historically by the wells of Clerkenwell, my interest, and how these were associated from the first with the drama and sports that were found there, including a newly identified site for the Skinners Well. This play, Jerusalem, swims in drink, from the rancid milk and raw egg tossed mercilessly into the stalls at Rylance’s first entrance, to the vodka which makes it down his throat. Intoxicating substances name the game, including alcohol. I diverge into criticism, only to refer to my interest in water and what we do with it.
To the east of the Seckford Estate, on the other side of St. John Street from where the Red Bull playhouse was active, were breweries and watering holes, created, perhaps, to cater for thirsty people associated with play. The term “play” can mean a lot of things. It can be a verb to do with games and sports, and this field saw those. This field, prior to the Reformation, and like the ‘Seckford Estate’ one, belonged to the Augustinian nuns of the priory of St. Mary. Butterworth’s drama about good-time ne’er-do-wells, both teenaged and older, in touch with a land so centred and dependent on Byron, reminded me of the kind of social perspective that must have taken place in those fields.
A prioress wrote to King Edward I in the early 14th century, complaining (in French) of how men would ride out from the City of London determined to play their games, trampling the nunnery’s crops with their aggressive pastimes. The Red Bull also catered to the apprentices and masters of the square mile. It saw thefts, assaults and even riots. But they were the ‘bums on seats’ at the end of the day, and no one was really complaining.
The End of April
It’s now the end of April, we teeter into May and its May games, and thinking about this effort I’d say we make a mistake if we don’t understand that the roots of entertainment were always meant for everybody. On one level, the Jacobean Red Bull playhouse may have just been an extension of the games and ‘plays’ that were active in the area over a much longer period, from long before the formalising of ‘literature’.
The mythology of giants and dragons to which the play Jerusalem refers is not far away from Red Bull fare, with its references to Merlin, and its mythical creatures recreated, for example, in Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays. His Four Prentices of London drama, and the multi-authored The Travails of the Three English Brothers, both performed at the Red Bull, possessed their own relationships with both what it is to be English and the Islamic world. In those fields across the way, I fear, archery was sometimes practised, not with arrows trained on a Bull’s eyes, but aimed towards mock-ups of Islamic ‘Moors’, in confusions of identity.
Standing stones, May Queens, Morris (or Moorish) dancing, St. John Ambulance, and even the stagnant pond where St. George’s dragon lived, are all mentioned in Jerusalem, somehow expressing what is the zenith of being English, while all the time referring to the Holy City of the Promised Land. Let’s not forget this play is comi-tragic. There is a lot of comedy in this play.
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon those clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic…
I walk along the streets around Shaftesbury Avenue after the show, and I realise it’s just a continuation of the forests of Wiltshire. The young people having a good time, some girls in short skirts, some boys sporting crew cuts, all taking footage of themselves on their mobile phones in an all-too now post-Brexit Britain. I clutch my programme as if it’s my very Welsh surname.
There are 50 days to the Easter festival, however, the time we now enjoy, after Lent, when we can drink again. But here’s the warning as I watch a programme about the much-loved comic, entertainer of the people, Tommy Cooper, and how he died to the sound of his audience’s laughter, wearing his Turkish fez: my father, brought up Methodist, took ‘the pledge’ not to drink alcohol when he was a teenager. When I knew him he drank a little Guinness occasionally, never constantly, and never regretted caution. I guess I am careful too. My friendly advice to you is to #BeDrinkAware.
And have a care with the drugs.
Those dark satanic… Satanic… What was it again?