Paul Russell is investigating a trapdoor in the attic space of a squat redbrick building next to Shakespeare's Globe. Above us is a thin black rope suspended from a girder. "This," says Russell, "is how our actors will fly." It looks a little flimsy. Has it been tested? "I don't think so," I'm told. "Want to be the first?"
If the mechanism seems primitive, this is entirely the point. Although the theatre to which Russell, production manager of the Globe, and his carpenters are applying the finishing touches is brand new, it is also deliberately old-fashioned: a painstaking re-creation of a building first sketched out four centuries ago. Below me, through another trapdoor, I can see a small neat stage and a shallow pit holding benches, with more benches curving away behind. Apart from the candelabras swaying below me, everything is fashioned from wood. It looks gorgeous, like a jewel box shimmering in amber candlelight.
We think of the drama of Shakespeare's time as an open-air affair, performed in the blustery Elizabethan amphitheatres of which the original Globe was the most famous example, until it burned down in 1613 owing to a cock-up with a cannon. But there was another side to Renaissance drama – and it is this that architects, historians and theatre-makers are attempting to conjure on Bankside. The new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – an offshoot of the modern Globe, named in memory of its founder – aims to bring the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in from the cold, creating an indoor playhouse closely modelled on the one his company began to use in 1608, across the Thames at Blackfriars. Although it's not the first time someone has attempted the feat – US scholars constructed a rival Blackfriars in the unlikely setting of a small city in Virginia 13 years ago – this will be the most authentic version yet, accurate (or as close as is possible) down to every hollow-bored oak pillar and trompe-l'oeil fresco. The whole project has cost £7.2m: one reason it's taken the Globe nearly two decades to get around to building it.
The Blackfriars let Shakespeare and his colleagues in the King's Men keep working through the winter, when it became impossible to perform in the Globe. For the Playhouse team, it is something much more exciting: a long-dreamed-of chance to see what the indoor theatre of Shakespeare's time looked, felt and sounded like.
The first shock, after descending from the attic, is how tiny the auditorium feels: while the Globe can accommodate 1,500 people, with up to 700 jostling on foot, the Playhouse seats just 340. But this only makes it more intimate, says academic Farah Karim-Cooper, who chairs the research group that has steered the project. "The proximity is unbelievable," she says. "You can get intimacy in the Globe – and when that happens it's beautiful. But here, it's really something."
While Elizabethan public theatres such as the Globe sought to cram the crowds in, "private" theatres such as Blackfriars were a chance to go upmarket, enabling companies to bump up ticket prices and attract a wealthier, more fashionable clientele. (Not everyone was happy, though: Blackfriars residents launched a petition complaining about the "great inconveniences" of having a theatre in their midst.) If you were an exhibitionist as well as rich, you could even pay extra to sit on stage and become part of the spectacle – a service the Playhouse is, alas, not offering just yet.
Indoor theatre wasn't only different for audiences: it changed the way plays were made. Shakespeare cut his teeth writing epic dramas for the big open-air playhouses, from multi-part history cycles to the sunny out-of-doors comedies As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. As the Jacobean period wore on, though, his scripts become more intense, as if adjusting to the space they now inhabited. "They have a photonegative quality," says Karim-Cooper. "You put A Midsummer Night's outside and it just makes sense, but inside it has a completely different feel."
Purpose-built indoor theatres also allowed theatre-makers to flex their creative muscles. Following James I's taste for masques – eye-wateringly lavish entertainments performed at court – Jacobean scripts begin to bristle with complex special effects: sudden descents of mythological figures (lowered on a device not unlike Russell's winch); strange apparitions in the so-called "discovery" space at the back of the stage. Shakespeare's The Tempest opens with a violent storm (thunder was often created by rumbling a cannonball through a pipe) and overflows with instrumental and sung music. Cymbeline, another late play, requires the god Jupiter to "descend in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle" and then – somehow – throw a thunderbolt. Music was of crucial importance too: the Blackfriars had its own handpicked group to provide atmospheric accompaniment.
Many of these effects had been pioneered by Elizabethans, but in an indoor theatre they would have had a vivid and sometimes unsettling effectiveness. Russell can't wait to install a £25,000 "star trap", a fearsome multi-sided trapdoor that uses counterweights to fire an actor up through the stage as if from nowhere. He smiles grimly. "The challenge is to get enough velocity – so you don't get cut off at the ankles."
But the greatest indoor breakthrough was something we now take for granted: control over light, impossible in the open air until the invention of gas lighting in the late 18th century. The Playhouse will be illuminated exclusively by candles, with artificial electronic daylight filtering through internal "windows". The team hopes this will be the new space's true revelation.
The Jacobeans used candles made from animal fat, but the Globe have gone for pure beeswax, costing up to £500 per show. The bees are from Yorkshire but, because the theatre's requirement is so huge, Russell is quietly anxious about whether supply can be maintained. Just installing and lighting candles for each performance is a major job, he says. "It takes three hours to get the theatre ready. You can't just flick a switch." I think of the fiery fate of the original Globe. Aren't so many naked flames dangerous? He takes me up to two huge fans hidden in the roof, the size of aircraft engines. "In an emergency," he says, "these suck out all the smoke."
The team have made other intriguing discoveries about low light. One is that the Jacobean fad for huge lace ruffs around the neck and wrists may have been as much practical as fashion-driven: they acted as reflectors, enhancing the face and making hands seem elegantly slender. Research also shows that women wore makeup containing crushed pearl or (for more modest budgets) mother of pearl, making their skin glow. Designer Jonathan Fensom, who is working on the Playhouse's opening show, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, pulls out a small pot to show me: a modern imitation by Chanel glitters seductively inside.
The Jacobeans also adored lustrous fabrics set off by jewels and sparkling accessories. Audiences for Malfi should keep their eyes peeled for a dress worn by Gemma Arterton, who plays the Duchess. "It's gold," says Fensom. "Absolutely wonderful. The folds in the fabric bring out all the contrasts."
Adjustable light has one further advantage: the chance to play with the audience's perceptions. The Winter's Tale includes a scene in which the heroine pretends to be a statue who comes back to life: notoriously tricky to stage under bright stage lights, but under candles gloriously believable. With their ghoulish twists, mistaken identities and blood-soaked props, Jacobean tragedies are often called shadowy. The Playhouse will at last allow us to see them as darkly as they were intended.
Fensom and Karim-Cooper have high hopes for one scene, in which the Duchess (who has been having an affair with one of her servants, to the horror of her brothers) is shown a group of wax figures and persuaded they are the corpses of her lover and children. Nowadays, it can seem a bit Madame Tussauds: wax bodies, really? Who'd fall for that? But under flickering candlelight, as an audience holds its breath, the illusion might just come off. "Jacobean tragedies are full of people in corners and overheard conversations," smiles Fensom. "Suddenly, you believe in it all."
