“Intimacy” at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

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 on 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 articles examines this somewhat complex term that has been used by reviewers and theatre historians with too little or no exposition at all. Analyzing what ‘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.