To step off the brisk, thoroughly modern thoroughfare of London’s South Bank and cross the threshold into the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is to submit to an immediate sensory dislocation. The familiar urban hum of the capital fades entirely, replaced by the faint, distinctive scent of melting beeswax and the soft creak of green oak underfoot. Here, nestled within the brick exterior of the Shakespeare’s Globe complex, lies an architectural anomaly and a theatrical marvel: an intimate, indoor Jacobean playhouse illuminated almost exclusively by the naked flame.
When it opened its doors to the public in January 2014, the Playhouse did significantly more than merely provide a weather-proof winter performance space for the Globe’s resident company. It answered a deeply rooted historical curiosity regarding how early modern theatre functioned when the sun went down and the skies turned bitter. With a capacity capped at a mere 340 patrons, the space enforces an inescapable, almost claustrophobic intimacy between the performers and the audience. It is, as early theatre reviewers and architectural critics accurately described it, a "jewel box shimmering in amber candlelight" - a venue where the lighting dictates the mood, the staging, and the very rhythm of the dramatic text.
The Transition Indoors: Blackfriars and the King's Men
To understand the significance of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, one must look back to the theatrical landscape of early 17th-century London. While the large, open-air amphitheatres like the original 1599 Globe are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination, they were primarily seasonal venues, vulnerable to the notoriously unpredictable English weather.
In 1608, a crucial shift occurred. Richard Burbage and his acting company, the King's Men - of which William Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder and principal playwright - took over the lease of the Blackfriars Playhouse. This was an indoor, private theatre built within the refectory of a former Dominican priory on the north bank of the Thames.
Moving indoors fundamentally altered the trajectory of English drama. The enclosed space commanded higher ticket prices, attracting a more affluent, literate, and arguably more demanding audience. Furthermore, the environment permitted the use of sophisticated artificial lighting and complex acoustic effects. Playwrights began to write specifically for this new medium. Shakespeare’s late romances, such as The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, with their intricate masques, magical interventions, and subtle psychological shifts, were explicitly designed to exploit the controlled, atmospheric conditions of a candlelit hall. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse exists to allow contemporary audiences to experience these texts in the specific environment for which they were calibrated.
The Architectural Blueprint: Worcester College and John Webb
The physical structure of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is not a direct, piece-by-piece replica of the Blackfriars or any single historical building. Instead, it serves as an archetype, a carefully researched distillation of the indoor playhouses that dominated London’s theatrical scene during the Jacobean and Caroline eras.
The foundational inspiration for the Playhouse’s design was derived from a serendipitous archival survival: a set of 17th-century architectural drawings discovered in the library of Worcester College, Oxford. For many decades, historians attributed these sketches to the celebrated royal architect Inigo Jones, the visionary responsible for introducing classical Italianate architecture to Britain. However, rigorous contemporary scholarship has reassigned the drawings to his protégé and assistant, John Webb.
Working directly from Webb's designs, the Globe’s Architecture Research Group, alongside the prominent architectural firm Allies & Morrison, undertook the meticulous task of translating ink on parchment into three-dimensional reality. The resulting interior is a stunning polygonal horseshoe, constructed almost entirely from traditional green oak and pine. The seating arrangement features a central standing-and-seated pit surrounded by two levels of tightly packed, richly carved wooden galleries.
The craftsmanship is highly deliberate. The builders utilized traditional mortise and tenon joints, eschewing modern steel frameworks in favour of historical authenticity. Above the stage, a beautifully painted canopy, known as the "heavens," is decorated with gold leaf and celestial imagery, complete with a functional trapdoor for the dramatic descent of gods and spirits - a staple of Jacobean theatrical machinery.
Engineering the Flame: Safety and Spectacle
The most arresting feature of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is undoubtedly its illumination. The auditorium is lit by over one hundred real beeswax candles. In an era governed by stringent health and safety regulations, the prospect of introducing naked flames into a densely packed, predominantly wooden theatre in the heart of London was an administrative and engineering hurdle of immense proportions.
The realisation of this vision required an unprecedented collaboration between theatre historians, the architects, and the London Fire Brigade. The solution is a triumph of invisible modern engineering. To manage the intense heat and the steady accumulation of smoke generated by the candles, the ceiling conceals a sophisticated, state-of-the-art ventilation system. Powerful, entirely silent "megafans" draw the hot air and smoke upward and out of the building, ensuring the atmosphere remains breathable and the temperature regulated, while fire safety insurers are kept satisfied.
The candles themselves are housed in historically accurate metal fixtures: elaborate hanging candelabra known as "branches," and mirrored wall-mounted sconces referred to as "wallers." The choice of beeswax over cheaper alternatives is not merely a stylistic indulgence; it burns cleaner and brighter than the foul-smelling tallow used by poorer classes in the 17th century. It produces a distinctive, sweet aroma that has become synonymous with the venue's atmosphere, adding an olfactory dimension to the historical immersion.
The Theatrical Alchemy of Candlelight
In a conventional modern theatre, a lighting designer commands a digital rig capable of producing infinite variations of colour, intensity, and focus at the push of a button. In the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the lighting is decidedly analog, requiring physical, manual intervention. This practical limitation has birthed a unique directorial grammar that redefines how a play is staged.
The candles are not static scenery; they are active, dynamic participants in the drama. Throughout a performance, the heavy iron branches are frequently raised and lowered on visible ropes by stagehands, altering the intensity of light on the stage below to signal a shift in time or location. Actors routinely carry individual tapers or small candelabras, casting harsh, dramatic shadows against the painted ceiling and the oak galleries.
The deliberate extinguishing of a single candle can plunge the space into an eerie, cinematic noir, heightening tension in a way that modern electrical blackouts struggle to replicate. Critics and directors alike have noted that the candlelight acts as "the lighting, the setting, the special effects." When staging bloody Jacobean revenge tragedies - such as John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi or John Ford’s 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, the very genre for which these indoor spaces were originally designed - the flickering amber glow lends a macabre, claustrophobic intensity to the violence. The shadows seem to harbour secrets, and the low light obscures the artificiality of stage blood.
Conversely, during intimate soliloquies or romantic interludes, the low light forces the audience to physically lean in, creating a shared, conspiratorial environment. The psychological effect is profound; the flickering light forces the human eye to work harder, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined, making the theatrical illusion deeply persuasive and frequently discombobulating.
As noted by theatre writers covering the space for publications like Creativitys.UK, this environment demands an entirely different kind of performance. Actors must navigate the space with spatial awareness of the hot wax, projecting their voices into the dense acoustics of the wooden room while relying on the subtleties of facial expression that the low light simultaneously obscures and highlights.
The Acoustics of Wood: A Theatrical Instrument
Beyond the visual spectacle of the candlelight, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is an acoustic revelation. The unvarnished oak and pine interior acts as a massive resonant chamber, functioning less like a standard auditorium and more like the inside of an acoustic guitar or a cello.
In the outdoor Globe, actors must project their voices outward to combat the open air, the noise of helicopters, and the general clamour of the city. In the Playhouse, the wooden walls trap and amplify sound with astonishing clarity. A whisper delivered downstage can be heard distinctly in the uppermost gallery. This acoustic sensitivity allows for a highly nuanced, conversational style of acting that is impossible in larger venues.
Music, an essential component of Jacobean drama, also thrives in this environment. Musicians occupy a dedicated gallery above the stage, playing period-accurate instruments - lutes, viols, and sackbuts. The live music reverberates through the timber frame, vibrating physically against the audience members seated on the wooden benches, creating a total sensory envelopment.
The Realisation of a Founder’s Vision
The existence of the Playhouse is the ultimate culmination of a decades-long campaign by Sam Wanamaker, the American actor and visionary director who doggedly pursued the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe against considerable institutional opposition and widespread skepticism.
Wanamaker, who passed away in 1993 - long before the outdoor Globe finally opened its doors to the public in 1997 - always envisioned the complex as a dual entity. He understood implicitly that to fully comprehend the theatrical ecology of early modern London, one had to experience both the raucous, sunlit energy of the public amphitheatre and the intense, exclusive atmosphere of the private indoor hall.
For over a decade, the intricately carved wooden interior we see today was merely a ghost. The brick shell that houses the theatre was built during the initial phase of the Globe project in the 1990s, but it remained a bare, concrete-floored void. It was utilized primarily as a rehearsal studio and a makeshift education space until the necessary millions were raised and the architectural research was finally finalized to complete the interior fit-out. Naming the venue in his honour was a fitting, necessary tribute to a man whose sheer force of will transformed a forgotten industrial stretch of the Thames into an international centre for classical theatre. The Playhouse represents the final, vital piece of his masterplan.
The Endurance of the Jacobean Time Machine
While it is heavily steeped in rigorous historical research, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is not a sterile museum piece. It is a functioning, vital organ of London's contemporary cultural landscape. Directors frequently push against the historical aesthetic, staging newly commissioned modern works, feminist reinterpretations of classic texts, and experimental acoustic concerts within its wooden walls.
However, it is when the space is utilized for its original, specific purpose - staging the dark, psychological dramas of the Jacobean era and Shakespeare's late, magical plays - that its true power is unleashed. It serves as a literal "time machine," collapsing the intervening centuries and allowing modern audiences to experience the specific, visceral thrill of poetic language performed in the shadows.
The physical demands placed on the audience - the hard, backless oak benches, the tight confines, the necessity of physical endurance - only add to the sense that attending a performance here is a commitment rather than a casual diversion. It is an active, demanding form of theatregoing that strips away the passive, heavily upholstered comfort of the modern West End auditorium. In doing so, it reminds us that the fundamental mechanics of theatre - a group of people gathered in a room, listening to a story told by firelight - remain as potent, essential, and utterly magical today as they were four hundred years ago. It stands as a vital continuation of London’s rich theatrical lineage, a subject frequently explored in depth across our Arts and Culture features.
