A Midsummer Night’s Rave: How the Globe Theatre’s Music Keeps Shakespeare Surprising

Throughout the summer of 2023, London’s Globe Theatre brought to life the ribald fantasy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of William Shakespeare’s best-loved comedies. Each night, as the sun disappeared beneath the moss-covered rim of the open-air theatre, a troupe of dexterous pros delivered the words of Western world’s most famous author just a stone’s throw from the Thames River. As befitting the 16th century source material, the production featured fairies, forests, iambic pentameter and men running around in baggy pantaloons — plus, club music pulsating in the background.

No, the Globe Theatre isn’t a victim of noise pollution — the thumping dance music was an intentional choice in the Elle While-directed production, which tapped composer James Maloney to deliver a few sonic surprises for this production of the 1590s play. Needless to say, Shakespeare (or Marlowe, if you’re a conspiracy theorist) wasn’t a known rave enthusiast, but what’s even more surprising is that everything you hear during a Globe performance is purely acoustic — meaning there’s no knobs, speakers or motherboards lending these dancefloors vibes to the Bard of Avon’s words.

So how do a handful of musicians using zero electronics create a soundscape that could pass for the 3am DJ set wafting out of a London hotspot like Fabric or Heaven? “It was simple, but it took a bit of workshopping,” Dream composer James Maloney insists to Billboard over coffee on a balmy afternoon. The formally trained, West Midlands-born head of music at the Globe may be a just a touch humble. After all, his techniques are not exactly intuitive – or even easy for the layman to understand. For the club music effect, Maloney directed a tubist to play on the off beats while an orchestral bass drummer softly accompanied a player on the double kick drum: “When the kick drum plays, the volume of the bass goes down, creating the womp-womp, which has become a signature of dance music,” he clarifies. (Elementary, right?)

The 2023 production of Dream offered numerous outside-the-box aural delights, including “droney, ethereal sounds” elicited by rubber balls brushed over metal sheets, as well as a disorienting zhing effect created by a metal rod slapped against “a piece of a lorry we found knocking about a workshop.” All of this – not the mention the Charlie Mingus-influenced jazz that opens the production – lends this version of the classic “a slightly menacing, chaotic edge” that prevents it from feeling like a recurring Dream you’ve experienced before.

“You have to be playful and experimental,” Maloney says of his approach to the production’s score. When asked if some patrons object to the inclusion of modern sounds in a centuries-old play written by England’s most revered scribe, Maloney looks off and responds diplomatically. “Naturally, people can have an opinion about what it should be, and occasionally there’s a sense of, ‘It should be more this, less this.’ But the way I approach it is that the Globe is and has always been a bit of an experiment.”

It’s undeniable that the Globe as it stands today is not your grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s (and so on) Globe. The original theatre burned down in 1613, and the second Globe that Shakespeare built was torn up sometime in the 1640s. In 1997, this theater – which is a meticulous reconstruction of the original – opened to much fanfare but uncertain long-term prospects. It was a gamble that paid off: In a city stuffed with historical attractions, it’s emerged as a top tourist destination, drawing international visitors and thousands of U.K. citizens who live outside of London. So even if some bristle at the contemporary flourishes, the inventiveness of Globe’s high-caliber productions makes amends ere long.

“Some people come to nearly every performance, and I mean that literally,” Maloney says. One high-profile example: Art-rock icon Kate Bush saw the Globe’s 2013 version of Dream more than a dozen times; she even subsequently used the production’s choreographer, Siân Williams, as the movement director for her 2014 residency at the Hammersmith Apollo in London.

So, to borrow a phrase coined by Shakespeare, the long and the short of it is that the Globe Theatre has paved a brick-lane path that evokes history but isn’t a prisoner to it, which allows the crew and players the opportunity to interpret hallowed material in novel ways.

The recent production of Dream is a testament to this. While the play has inspired everything from Hollywood flicks to a George Balanchine ballet to music from Felix Mendelssohn, the 2023 iteration somehow manages to deliver a fresh take on the source material. Most stage versions depict an orderly Athens that’s juxtaposed with a whimsical forest. In the hands of While’s production, Athens is a bit of a party town, imbued with a barely restrained libido. As Maloney puts it, “The forest is to Athens like a smoking area is to a club.” With that in mind, Maloney went about crafting music and sonic cues that are “a strange refraction of senses and sounds,” conjuring “the idea of a night club next door where you can just hear the music.”

Maloney’s experimental bent might be a symptom of his unusual road to working in a world-renown theater. “Where I’m from, there’s very little with regards to theater,” he says of his upbringing outside Birmingham. “It never felt like an option. Music didn’t really, either, except for the fact that I could study it.” After poring over music composition during his time at Oxford, he graduated in 2011, moved to Paris and began working at a bakery. When an Internet listing for a music-related job at the Globe caught his eye, he sent in an application with no expectations, figuring his music background was “too formal” and his lack of theater credentials would prove to be a nonstarter. To his surprise, he heard back, returned to London for an interview and got the gig.

As it turned out, theater experience wasn’t exactly necessary for the position he occupied when he started at the Globe in 2013 – it was a lot of photocopying, tea fetching and other operational tasks. After several years of working “in a creative environment without doing creative stuff,” he channeled his energy into recording Gaslight, a DIY album of minimalist, meditative music, at his parents’ house. In what Maloney describes as “an act of enormous generosity,” the acclaimed theater director Matthew Dunster – who worked at the Globe from 2015-2017 – was impressed enough with his side hustle that he asked Maloney to help with some of the music on a 2016 production of Cymbeline, titled Imogen. Following that, Maloney was invited to score a 2017 Globe staging of Much Ado About Nothing, which “changed everything” for him.

Now, Maloney regularly composes scores for Shakespearean productions (in addition to other theatrical gigs) while maintaining his role as head of music at the Globe Theatre. The latter position is a jack-of-all-trades job that involves finding musicians proficient in unusual instruments (while his scores veer toward the modern, many other Globe productions include antiquated instruments like the sackbut and shawm), troubleshooting rough patches during rehearsals and assisting other composers with the unexpected challenges endemic to composing music for an open-air space with exclusively acoustic instruments.

“The most surprising thing that you, as a composer, go through [when working on a Globe production] is the process where you cease to be a musician and become, for want of a better expression, a theater maker. You find yourself sacrificing musical ideas for dramatic decisions. You have to say, ‘That bit of your music that’s your favorite bit, we’re not doing it, because it doesn’t work with the storytelling.’ Or, ‘It’s too loud, you can’t hear the actor.’

“You’re the person sacrificing, because you instinctively know the production works better without it,” he continues. “It’s not just the music – it’s broader than that. It’s such an intense, exhausting experience. Saying 400-year-old words and dressing up, it’s not brain surgery — but it feels important when you’re doing it and there’s all these personalities and vulnerabilities in a room. It’s very meaningful.”