Gabriel - Globe Theatre

Set of Gabriel

This afternoon found me once more at Shakespeare's Globe, to see the final performance of Gabriel, starring trumpeter Alison Balsom. Again, I didn't know anything about this production other than that it was set in seventeenth century England and would feature a reasonable amount of Baroque trumpet music. It's fun going to a production knowing very little about it beforehand.

Set in 1690s London, Gabriel turned out to be a series of vignettes featuring a variety of characters covering the spectrum of society  - Queen Mary II and her sickly nephew, the Duke of Gloucester, coarse watermen, musicians, a theatre director, a tapster...What these scenes had in common was that they all referred to the trumpet in some way. One of the themes of the play was the idea of people who felt voiceless being able to give expression to their thoughts and feelings through a musical instrument (namely the trumpet). Each scene was followed by music by Purcell or Handel.

Did I enjoy it? The first half felt very promising to me; the first fifteen minutes in particular were funny and exuberant and exciting. The costumes looked authentic and I couldn't fault the music and singing. However. There was a lot of bawdy and lavatorial humour, which I generally find funny in small doses, but in this production it was too much. It felt gratuitous. It seemed as though the writer was trying to compensate for the seriousness and grandeur of the music by making the non-music speaking bits as light, frivolous and farcical as possible. There was a big contrast between the music and the spoken vignettes, which featured flatulence (this scene I actually found pretty funny), full-frontal male nudity (more than once) and simulated oral sex.

I thought the second half dragged, but I enjoyed the scene with Queen Mary II (Charlotte Mills) and William, the Duke of Gloucester (Joshua James), which was amusing and poignant. The starling given to William by the Queen as a pet was well done and enjoyable to watch - it was a model bird manipulated by an actor. There were lots of little touches that added favourably to the atmosphere of the piece, such as the wooden boards representing London landmarks that were held up while a boatful of musicians was being punted down the Thames, to represent the movement of the boat. I also liked the parody of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I suppose vignettes are almost inevitably unsatisfying as it's hard to give the characters much depth or show development. At the end Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director at the Globe, came on to give a little history of the show, and because of it being the final performance, the cast members threw roses into the audience. Finis.

Next: Blue Stockings