Flamenco lands at the Globe: how a Spanish art form became the Globe's answer to Shakespeare

At the Globe's rehearsal rooms on Bankside this week, eleven actors have been punching the floor, snapping their wrists and trying to breathe through palmas claps at 140 beats per minute. The company of Love's Labour's Lost has just completed a five-day flamenco bootcamp before previews begin; by the time the curtain rises, the production will treat Shakespeare's comedy of sworn bachelors and arriving princesses as a piece of Andalusian dance drama.

The premise is unfashionable, and that is the point. Director Indiana Lown-Collins has argued in a piece for The Observer that the play's volatility, an oscillation between ardour and death news, has no real equivalent in English theatrical tradition. Spanish flamenco, she writes, was built for exactly that volatility, pairing duende, an improvised emotional intensity rooted in Andalusian Roma and Moorish traditions, with the structural discipline of compás, the twelve-beat rhythmic cycle that underpins the form. The result, she suggests, is the only home-grown European performance language that can hold both registers at once.

Why this play, why this idiom

Love's Labour's Lost is the awkward cousin of the canon. Its early scenes read like a Restoration wit-comedy: four young men vow to study, fast and see no women. Then a princess arrives with her ladies, the men break their oath in the space of an afternoon, and the script pivots, mid-scene, into the death of the Princess of France's father and the unmourned promises that close the play. The fifth act is widely treated as Shakespeare's refusal to write the wedding his audience expected, and that refusal is what Lown-Collins says she is staging. "It's not a comedy that ends," she told The Observer. "It's a comedy that interrupts itself. Flamenco knows how to interrupt itself."

The choice lands inside a wider argument about how British theatre has handled Spanish material for two centuries. Carmen, Don Juan and the bullfight have functioned in British popular culture as shorthand for hot-blooded excess. A serious engagement with flamenco as a formal system, with its own grammar of marcaje (marking steps), braceo (arm work) and llamada (a call that signals the singer to change), has been rare on the English stage. The Globe's production is an attempt to import the grammar with the heat.

Bootcamp, then book

The actors spent five days working with flamenco specialists before being handed the script. Lown-Collins has written that the company learned the basic twelve-count cycle first, then built the text on top, the inverse of how a Shakespeare play is usually mounted, with movement and choreography designed around an already-locked text. The Guardian's reporting from the rehearsal room describes palmas ringing through the building and dancers dropping into braceo mid-line. It is, the paper's writer notes, a small concession to the argument that flamenco is not decoration but a different scoring of a scene.

The bet carries obvious risks. A British ensemble, however game, working in a form that rewards a lifetime of physiological training, will not produce dancers of the calibre of a María Pagés or an Israel Galván. The Guardian's reporter flags that fact gently; the actors themselves are described as "thrilled and slightly terrified." What the production can offer, by contrast, is authenticity of approach rather than technical finish, the willingness to let the script bend to the music rather than the other way around.

What is being tested

The interesting cultural-economy question is not whether the show works, but what kind of work it does for the Globe's brand. The theatre has spent three decades selling authenticity, a reconstructed Jacobean playhouse, an all-male, all-British early-practice ensemble and a programmatic refusal of modern dress. A Spanish-inflected Shakespeare, performed by actors who are mostly not from Spanish or Roma traditions, is a real stretch of that brief. It is also, plausibly, an attempt to claim the same ground the RSC staked when it cast non-British ensembles in the histories: that universality is proven by who is on stage, not by who is in the audience.

The counter-narrative sits close by. There is a long British tradition of treating Iberian forms as picturesque borrowing, Carmen on the West End, hooped skirts and fan-claps, more or less since Bizet first crossed the Channel. Whether this Love's Labour's Lost breaks from that tradition or extends it will be the thing reviews will be forced to answer. Lown-Collins's own framing, in The Observer, leans on the term duende, the Spanish-language word for an irreducible, earthbound artistic presence, and on Federico García Lorca's mid-century lectures on the form. The risk of that framing is that it exoticises the thing it claims to honour; the reward is a reading of the play's fifth act that has nothing to do with Spanishness and everything to do with grief.

Stakes beyond the South Bank

Theatre in London is in a precarious summer. Several major houses have trimmed seasons; commercial producers have been accused, in recent press, of leaning on nostalgia and on the small number of long-running musicals. A Globe experiment that uses a 425-year-old text to import a living non-British performance form is, on those terms, a small counter-programming. If the show succeeds on its own terms, it widens what a flagship national theatre can look like; if it fails, it confirms the suspicions of those who argue that British classical theatre should stop reaching.

The first preview will tell. Until then, the most useful fact on the record is straightforward: a south-London company learned palmas before they learned their lines, and a director has decided, in writing, that the play's mix of ardour and mortality only really exists in one European tradition. Whether the staging proves her right is the question that matters.

Desk note: Monexus has treated this as a cultural-policy story rather than a soft feature, framing the Globe's choice as a programme decision about whose performance traditions count as native to the English stage. Where wire coverage (The Observer, The Guardian) leans profile-first, this piece foregrounds the production's argument with the form.