yet another helpful and informative 253
FOOTNOTE

The New Globe Theatre is real, it exists, I've seen Two Gentlemen of Verona played on its stage. It changes Shakespeare. The scenes were written for that stage; they fit. The balcony is a convenient height for handing down notes. The kiosk centre stage makes hiding easy; the enforced simplicity of the staging makes changing from tempest sea to island sanctuary quick and simple. A comic character wanders on with a real dog, and what is slightly tiresome banter at the National or on the page, becomes a crowd-pleasing comic turn. The plays become gigs, broad and barnstorming. The modern audience somehow knows that it's all right to shout back at the actors.

The world is as full of coincidence as 253 . Standing amid the groundlings in front of the stage was a tall, grey, benignly smiling man. I saw him hitch his shoulder in a way that meant his left arm was withered.

I recognized him. This was the Englishman who taught me Shakespeare at UCLA. He was young then and for North Americans a baffling mix of what would have seemed shyness to Americans and a kind of wild Englishness. On the day of a major earthquake, he showed in class wearing flourescent disaster gear and a construction worker's orange hard hat.

I didn't remember his name. Later, I tried to find him but he was lost among the crowd streaming out through the doors like commuters from a a train.

Just a splinter of the past. I wonder if his last name was Thatcher?

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