We had a plan.
We would wake up at our hotel near Paddington Station, walk to the little family-owned breakfast place a couple of blocks away, enjoy a leisurely morning meal, and stroll three blocks to catch the tube. We had done it the day before as a practice run. We knew the route. We had our tour tickets. We had plenty of time.
London weather had other ideas.
We descended the stairs to the platform and waited. The digital sign listed arriving trains. The trains did not arrive. The platform filled. People squeezed past each other on the stairs, some giving up and leaving, others, unaware of the backlog, still pressing down. Finally an announcement came: a train was stranded on the line. The station was being evacuated.
What we didn’t know was that record heat was causing malfunctions within the transit system, and would ultimately cause shutdowns of ten tube lines.
We emerged into the London heat, confused and without a backup plan. Unlike the locals around us, we didn’t know the city. We weren’t prepared for this.
I spotted a bus stopped at the curb and asked the driver if he could help us get to the Globe Theatre. He apologized and explained he was just a local city route and didn’t know the way.
A bearded man who looked about thirty noticed our situation and offered to help. He pulled out his phone, checked a routing app that accounted for the disruptions, and showed me the updated directions on his screen. I photographed them. Over the next hour, three more strangers, men and women, stepped forward at exactly the right moments to guide us, redirect us, and point us toward our destination through back lanes and unfamiliar streets until we finally turned a corner and saw the Thames. And there, just past the trees on the right, was the Globe. We were already across the river and didn’t know it.
We had made it.
We arrived at the tour entrance twenty minutes late, sweating in the unseasonable heat, slightly disheveled and considerably relieved. We explained our situation to the staff. They couldn’t have been kinder. They assured us we could join the next tour departing in ten minutes. They brought water. They found a chair for my wife, who was visibly fatigued. In that moment, the welcoming by those Globe Theatre staff members felt totally appropriate. This is a place built around human stories. They were living one.
We collected our personal audio tour systems and headphones, refreshed ourselves, and waited.
Then the door opened.
I have been to Disneyland more times than I can count. I know that feeling of stepping through the gates into a world designed to transport you. Standing in the Groundlings area of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre gave me that same sensation, except the magic here was four hundred years old and entirely real.
Yes, I know this is not the original structure. Yes, I know it is not even on the original site. None of that mattered. Standing there, looking up at that stage, at the painted ceiling of the Heavens above it, at the three tiers of galleries wrapping around the open yard, I felt something I can only describe as being at ground zero. Holy ground. The place where the words were first spoken out loud to crowds of real human beings who laughed, wept, argued, and ate oranges while the greatest playwright who ever lived watched from the wings.
I wanted to get on that stage. I knew it would be frowned upon, so I restrained myself. But I felt the impulse clearly, the way you feel a sneeze coming on. I wanted to stand in the center of that wooden O and recite the one Shakespeare sonnet I know by heart. Just to feel it. Just to hear what my voice would sound like in that space.
I also had to restrain myself during the tour itself when our guide asked the group if anyone knew something about the theatre’s history. I answered a couple of times. I tried not to overdo it. But I had studied for this test, and I could not entirely help myself.
A kind of youthful exuberance flushed my old bones.
After the tour came the museum and exhibition space, where we walked through displays of costumes, props, and history. They had a dress-up section where visitors were encouraged to try on period costumes and take photos. Both of us being actors, we couldn’t resist. I found a crown and robes that suited me rather well, if I do say so. I’m no stranger to playing kings in Shakespeare’s plays.
This was not my first visit to the Globe. In 2004 I came as part of a small group organized by a friend, a college history professor who had studied at Oxford. We stayed near Hampton Court and visited London, Stratford, and Edinburgh. I saw a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe and browsed the gift shop. I didn’t take the tour. I probably didn’t think I needed to.
That was ten years before I went back to performing. Ten years before Much Ado About Nothing, before Shakespeare & Company, before the Long Beach Shakespeare Company. Before I became the kind of person who can’t stop himself from answering the guide’s questions on a theatre tour.
The same building. Completely different eyes.
I stood next to a bust of Shakespeare himself and thought about the seventeen-year-old who sat in a darkened room in California watching Laurence Olivier play Othello and felt his life quietly shift direction. That boy grew up, served in the military, raised a family, built a career in accounting, retired, went back to school for Shakespeare, trained at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts, joined a Shakespeare company in Long Beach, and eventually found himself sweating through a London heat wave, guided by four kind strangers, standing on holy ground.
It was worth every drop of sweat.
Have you ever visited a place that felt like a pilgrimage? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.