Transcript

Michelle Terry: It’s a very, very profoundly challenging time for everybody. Mother Nature has certainly thrown us a huge challenge and somewhere in there I know there is huge opportunity. I keep thinking of the Rumi quote and he said ‘Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure’. I feel like we’re all on a massive treasure hunt right now.

I look at what is happening in the Globe and I’m watching unbelievable amount of tenacity, resilience, courage, bravery, faith, hope, the desire and the will to think differently, to reimagine the world and reimagine what theatre looks like, reimagine what connection looks like, reimagine what storytelling looks like. For the Globe, it’s reimagining what a classroom looks like. How do you take an art form and plays and a theatre that is fundamentally built on participation? Whether that’s groundlings in the yard with actors in the stage or practitioners in the classroom with students, or lecture halls filled with students. How do we take that now and either try to recreate it? Or I suppose somewhere in there we take Shakespeare as our guide and look at other ways to use it, with all the faith and hope and belief that the doors will open again.

You know, we know that he wrote Venus and Adonis, we know that he wrote Anthony and Cleopatra, Macbeth… all of these came out of a mind that was clearly exploding with ideas at the point that the theatres closed. So maybe that’s what it’s about… pausing and breathing and completely imagining something entirely new and getting ready for when the doors are open again.

Possibly, like most people, I’ve found recent events fairly overwhelming. And so where do you turn to? I turn to poetry and I turn to literature and I turn to guides from the past, I look to history to help me understand what happened then in order to learn how to cope with now. I keep thinking of Hamlet, ‘the time is out of joint’, I keep thinking of him saying ‘now I am alone’, but surrounded by three thousand people in the Globe. Now we are all alone, in various states of alone-ness but we are also together, connected to billions of people. ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’. We are journeying towards a very ‘brave new world’. I keep thinking of that amazing quote from Measure for Measure: ‘our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt’. When there is so much doubt and so much fear at the moment, there’s also so much good and so much to win and so much to strive for and to work for. And maybe that’s what this time is about.

In the meantime, there will definitely be some really exciting content coming whether that’s from Globe Player, so streaming some of our lives films for free, a brand new piece called Love in Isolation, where artists share some of their favourite words that they find comfort in or inspiration from, all recorded from their place of sanctuary. And then of course this amazing podcast, Such Stuff, new episodes every week, new discussion, new debate, interviews, content created bespoke to the time and all inspired by Shakespeare. And all inspired by our amazing theatre and all the things that they stand for, which do not have to disappear just because we can’t be together. We can still participate, we can still communicate, we can still collaborate, and we can still celebrate and we continue and will continue to do all of those things, with you and for you over the coming weeks.

[Music plays]