THEATRE: Review – Bedlam Shakespeare’s Globe

 

The Southbank has always been an anarchic place. Shakespeare’s Globe proudly reminds visitors that Elizabethan theatres were considered far too lawless – and, implicitly, too much fun – to be licensed within the city limits. After years of rubbing shoulders with gamblers, pimps, and bear-baiters, by 1815 most theatres had advanced to the semi-respectability of the West End, only to be replaced in Southwark by their natural heirs, the lunatics of Bedlam. For fashionable Londoners, the hospital’s patients fulfilled much the same role as Shakespeare’s actors had done before them, providing a voyeuristic thrill on the hospital’s packed weekly open days, a chance to mock or mediate on the wilder extremes of human pathos, before the closing bell sent the spectators home to continue everyday life, leaving the performers safely confined and controlled. Nowadays, we just flick a switch and leave the lunatics on hold in the Big Brother house.