Italian Cuisine

To the Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank on Sunday to see their production of King Lear. Probably not the cheeriest choice for a summer Sunday afternoon – the stage was littered with bodies by the end. However, the magnificent production more than compensated – David Calder was a believable, often fragile, very human Lear. And the Fool, played by Danny Lee Wynter was both witty and compelling.

The couple behind me seemed to enjoy it too, though rather more intrusively than I would have liked. They whispered noisily to one another at key moments, chomped apples and nuts, and fidgeted the whole time. They’d also left their mobile phone on, which proceeded to trill chirpily at an intense part of the performance. Infuriating.

The Globe and its players, however, rise above all such annoyances. It’s part of the open to the skies experience. The actors cope brilliantly with helicopters hovering overhead, winds gusting off the Thames, audience distractions (an unfortunate lady in the standing area fainted on Sunday) – even curious pigeons landing on the stage. In fact they’re so skilled that they can sometimes build these things into their performance (at one production I saw, an actor cleverly directed some of his lines at a pigeon that kept waddling across the stage). It’s what makes the Globe alive – and the very best place to see, and understand, Shakespeare.