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  • Holding Fire! at Shakespeare's Globe

  • By Brian Logan

    Posted: Mon Jul 30 2007

  • Time Out talks to Jack Shepherd about radical politics, snobbery at the Globe and how you can show history in the making

    Holding Fire! at Shakespeare's Globe

    Cornelius Booth, Louise Callaghan and Craig Gazey in Jack Sheperd's 'Holding Fire!' © Andy Bradshaw

  • We Brits do a good job of concealing our radical history. In any other country, decapitating the head of state is a revolution. In Britain, we rebranded that 1640s dust-up as a civil war – thus handily sustaining the myth that ours is an essentially conservative country. Tell that to the Chartists, who brought the UK to the brink of insurrection in the 1800s. But we’ve airbrushed them out of folk memory as well – tyro director Mark Rosenblatt had never heard of them until he came to direct Jack Shepherd’s ‘Holding Fire!’, which is bringing rebellion to the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe this week.
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    Admittedly, the Chartists can look from a distance like rather milquetoast revolutionaries. ‘Equal-sized electoral districts!’ they raged. ‘An end to the property qualification!’ But in the nineteenth century, these arcane points of process represented giant’s steps on the road to democracy, says Shepherd. His new play caps a triptych of dramas – with ‘Through a Cloud’ (about Milton and Cromwell) and 1989’s Time Out Award-winning ‘In Lambeth’ (about William Blake and Tom Paine) – that measure revolution against evolution, and revisit the moments when Britain squared up to power and embraced progressive change.

    And where better to stage a revolution than the Globe? It would be daft to whip up anti-establishment fervour from the stage of the Duke of York’s. But on Bankside, where the audience is physically engaged, and the theatre’s nightly transformations suggest the possibility of transformation in the real world – well, should Gordon Brown be drawing up the ramparts? Shepherd promises to bestir the audience, casting them as ‘different characters in every scene,’ he says. Now the crowd become weavers, now Chartists, now a mob at Kersal Moor in the army’s line of fire. ‘Some of them,’ says Shepherd, ‘might think, “hang on, I can act here! I can play a part if I like.” Hopefully they will enjoy themselves in a less polite way than normal.’

    No one is better placed to anticipate how the Globe audience might respond. With ‘Holding Fire!’, Shepherd (best known for his 1990s stint as ITV’s ‘Wycliffe’) becomes the first person to act, write and direct for the Shakespearean venue. It is, he says, ‘the Rolls-Royce of storytelling theatres… It likes event.’ But it took him time to adjust to the Globe’s disdain for naturalistic acting. At his first performance here, as Antonio in 1998’s ‘Merchant of Venice’, ‘it just looked like I couldn’t act. At the Globe, you’ve got to go out to the audience and be extrovert.’

    It’s with befuddlement that Shepherd has seen ‘my generation of directors absolutely dismiss this place. They thought it wasn’t a serious theatre.’ Snobbery has always surrounded the Globe, as practitioners sensed, says Shepherd, that ‘there’s nowhere to hide here. As a director, you’re used to controlling almost everything that happens. Here, you can’t control anything.’ You can’t even change how the Globe looks. ‘The only way you’ll ever transform the space,’ says Shepherd, ‘is by provoking the audience’s imaginations.’ So: a place that prioritises collaboration over ego, that is as chaotic as life itself, and dispenses with limits on the imagination? It’s the perfect theatre – and the perfect place to stage a revolution.

    With a whopping ninety speaking parts, ‘Holding Fire!’ stages the opposition between violent (led by Feargus O’Connor) and non-violent (led by Shepherd’s hero, William Lovett) wings of the Chartist movement, and tells the Dickensian tale of a London waif making her way in the world. After debating revolution in his previous plays, Shepherd was eager to show one. At first, he didn’t know how: ‘I couldn’t think of the right event in British history. I even thought of writing the Pol Pot story as if it happened in Stevenage.’ It was playwright Trevor Griffiths who suggested Chartism: ‘a revolution that very nearly happened but didn’t,’ says Shepherd. ‘Their story starts off like “Battleship Potemkin” and ends up like “The Titfield Thunderbolt”.’

    Shepherd refuses to flog the contemporary parallels, but he will reflect on ‘the irony that Lovett fought tooth and nail to get people first an education, then the vote. And nowadays, people don’t vote, and it’s cool to reject education.’ He also finds it ‘interesting at the moment that wealth is being held by a smaller and smaller percentage of people, as it was at the time of this play.’ While Time Out will feel a tad deflated if ‘Holding Fire!’ doesn’t foment uproar in the streets of Southwark, Shepherd is content that it jog memories of his forgotten heroes, and make audiences view their own world afresh. ‘That’s the important thing,’ he says. ‘Propaganda is useless. If you’re leading the audience towards your own opinion, that’s a wasted effort. I want to make people think.’

    ‘Holding Fire!’ plays at Shakespeare’s Globe.

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