Actors win reprieve for Shakespeare site

Press, 17 May 1989, Page 10

Actors win reprieve for Shakespeare site

NZPA-Reuter London A vigil by British actors at a dusty London building site delayed plans yesterday to entomb the remains of the open-air Rose Theatre, where William Shakespeare is believed to have performed. Developers said they had agreed to more negotiations with archaeologists before dumping sand and gravel over the excavation and erecting an office tower on top of it. Shakespeare’s words rang through the open-air theatre for the first time in almost 400 years when a cast that included lan McKellen, Dame Peggy Ashcroft and James Fox read from his works during an all-night candle-lit protest. “I realise that the advent of so-called progress rings the death knell on this, to us, magnificent find,” Sir Laurence Olivier said in a message. “But it seems to me terrible that one’s heritage can be swept under the concrete as though it never, existed.”

Protesters linked arms yesterday morning to prevent trucks spilling their loads where Shakespeare is believed to have acted and where his “Henry VI” is thought to have been performed for the first time in 1592. The demonstrators cheered as the trucks retreated. “We are making history because we are preserving history,” said one protester after a local member of Parliament announced that the developers were willing to hold more talks with the Environment Department. The developers say entombment will protect and preserve The Rose, discovered when an office building beside the River Thames was torn down last December. Critics say the past will be buried and the public denied a chance to see the first such excavation of a Shakespearean theatre. The Rose, named after a neighbourhood brothel, was built in 1587. Plays were last performed there in 1603 and the polygonal arena was demolished soon after.