AI Profile - Patrick Spottiswoode

Work has just begun on creating the Shakespeare Globe’s £6m education and rehearsal centre in what used to be the theatre’s headquarters, known as the Bear Gardens. It’s a very fitting way to mark the 25th anniversary of the arrival of the director of education, Patrick Spottiswoode.

There’s an historical symmetry about Globe Education going back in the Bear Gardens, 50 yards away from where the theatre now stands. It was from this ramshackle Victorian corner building in Park Street that Sam Wanamaker conceived what has become Shakespeare’s Globe, a recreation of the theatre Shakespeare and Burbage built which has become as much a part of the London tour as Tower Bridge and the London Eye.

But the whole thing started as an education project, something the callow Patrick Spottiswoode was unaware of when he turned up for an interview.

“I saw the ad in the Guardian, ‘museum manager’, and it said there were two theatres to manage, an exhibition, a shop, a café… I thought I was going to the Barbican”. The two theatres turned out to be a room and a 30-seater auditorium, the exhibition was a ramshackle collection of theatrical memorabilia, with a vast stuffed bear at the entrance, and the café was a kettle. Exhibition were an eclectic mix of Sam’s interests, from bear and bull baiting to the trade union movement to Thames watermen.

But he was caught by the Wanamaker dream. A Warwick University PhD student suffering from second year PhD ennui he was looking for something to fill a year’s break from his paper on Sydney, Spenser and Shakespeare, and he has never picked up that particular pen again.

Instead he became Wanamaker’s amanuensis, keeper of the flame Sam had lit of finding out about how drama worked for Shakespeare by remaking his theatre.