Shakespeare Revisited: The Globe Part II

If you couldn't tell, I was enamored with the Globe yesterday.  The theatre, the acting, the play, the period clothing.  Heavenly!  So when Nicole told me she had an extra ticket for Macbeth, my favorite Shakespeare tragedy, I couldn't turn it down!  We were in the standing portion of the theatre this time and purposely situated ourselves as close to the stage and one of the stage staircases as possible.  Given our experience last night, we knew that this was a great place to be as the actors use the stairs during the production and boy am I glad we did.

The play was featuring Billy Boyd as Banquo, Macbeth's friend and fellow general.  You may know Billy as the hobbit Pippin from the Lord of the Rings films.  He was amazing, as were the other cast, and he passed us several times.  This means that I have now stood less than a foot away from both Russell Tovey and Billy Boyd.  How surreal is that?!

The stage after Banquo's ghost shows up to dinner

Once again, we were treated to great acting performances as well as dancing and singing (it's amazing how multi-talented these actors are).  Surprisingly, there was a lot more humor than I'm used to seeing in Macbeth.  Some of it was the way certain lines were presented but other times it was hard to identify what exactly people were laughing at.  For instance, in the scene where Macbeth starts seeing the (imaginary) daggers in front of him, he looked around the crowd pondering before seeing the daggers.  He must have made eye contact with people because there was quite a bit of laughing before he jumped into the dagger scene.  It wasn't distracting really just a little weird.  I have to say it's really neat when the actors make eye contact with you though as they'll try to engage you while staying in character and respond to your response.  That's great acting to be able to do that while staying in character.  It would be incredibly easy to lose character with so big an audience around you.

In addition to the amazing play we ran into a couple of Americans today at the theatre and had a great conversation with them.  They had just finished visiting Denmark and were taking in Doctor Who and various theatre experiences in the London area.  It turns out there is a large Doctor Who shop around here that might be worth checking out and we had an interesting conversation about cabarets in the area.  Love getting to compare notes with other travelers :)

Thank you to the two awesome ladies who made it all possible today.  I'm really grateful!