"Intimacy" at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Abstract

"Intimacy" at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Sarah Dustagheer The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) opened next to Shakespeare's Globe on London's South Bank in January 2014. The new theater is described, by the Globe, as an "archetype" of a Jacobean indoor playhouse and is based on the Worcester College plans for an unknown seventeenth-century indoor playhouse. Following these designs, the SWP is a U-shaped theater, with galleries surrounding a pit of seating and a small platform stage; it is a candlelit space and holds approximately 340 people. One word has reoccurred in reviews and responses to this new theater and the Jacobean repertory performed in it: "intimate." This is an "intimate venue," declared Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard; the theater has a "smallness and intimacy" (Paul Taylor, The Independent), or an "intimacy and delicacy" (Natasha Tripney, The Stage). Similarly, actors working in the space describe it as "so intimate" (Emily Barber and Fiona Button) and "much more intimate" than the Globe (Dickon Tyrrell). Before the SWP's opening, theater historians writing on indoor Jacobean theaters were similarly drawn to that word to describe such venues: "smaller, more intimate performance spaces" (White 145); indoor playhouses had a "greater intimacy" than outdoor ones (Sanders 74); the Blackfriars "institutionaliz[ed] intimacy" (Menzer 169). Moving Shakespeare Indoors is an edited collection that marked the opening of the SWP and includes several academics who had contributed to the research for the playhouse's design; in it Penelope Woods suggests that "intimacy is overdue attention and exposition, particularly from historians," particularly as we experience the first performances in the SWP (159). Although in this publication Woods and Paul Menzer offer some consideration of intimacy, I want to take up the challenge by examining at length a very complex term that is predominantly deployed by reviewers and historians with too little or no exposition at all. Analyzing what [End Page 227] intimacy means at the SWP over the first two years of its use reveals much about the unique environment of the playhouse, its actor/audience dynamic and modern interpretations of the Jacobean indoor repertory. Moreover, as work on intimacy in performance has arisen from analysis of very recent theatrical trends—immersive theater experiences, site-specific productions, and one-on-one performance—considering intimacy at the SWP demonstrates the distinctive place of this Jacobean archetype in the contemporary theaterscape. Theatrical Intimacy "A good working definition of intimacy recognizes that the ultimate definition is unobtainable," writes psychologist Karen J. Prager (13). Intimacy is a slippery term and one that shifts meaning across space, time, cultural frames, and disciplines. Intimacy has been examined in myriad ways in psychology (Prager; Meares; Mashek and Aron), sociology/philosophy (Giddens; Innes; and Zeldin) and in contemporary cultural studies (Rojek; Illouz). While drawing on these bodies of work, it is important to narrow focus on intimacy in the theater, a comparatively under-examined idea, in order to understand what occurs at the SWP. An intimate "theatrical performance" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as one that "aims at establishing familiar and friendly relations with the audience" ("intimate," adj. 3.e.); and the entry appears under the meaning of "intimate" as "Close in acquaintance or association; closely connected by friendship or personal knowledge; characterized by familiarity (with a person or thing)" ("intimate," adj. 3). The centrality of "closeness" in this definition reminds us of the original etymology of the word from the Latin intimus, meaning "inmost." Thus intimate theater appears to denote a relationship between actors and audience members within a given space, one that fosters a closeness between these two agents; a closeness that results in a form of "intimacy" as in "closeness of observation, knowledge or the like" (OED, "intimacy," n. 1.c). Such a definition parallels those in psychology where an "intimate interaction" is defined by the type of close communication it produces; for Prager and Linda J. Roberts these interactions are marked by self-revealing behavior, positive involvement with the other and shared understandings where "both partners experience a sense of knowing or understanding some aspect of the other's inner experience" (45). "Intimate" as a verb means "to make known," deriving from the Latin...