He couldn't build on the Grade I-listed monument even if he tried This exhibition serves to remind

He couldn't build on the Grade I-listed monument even if he tried This exhibition serves to remind people of its existence.. There are parallels in the 1990s with people who are attracted to London in search of work."Architects often borrow theatrical devices, but they still have to make the shelter substantial Bill Dudley's show is in direct response to the site. When Dudley began researching the site, he discovered there had been 67 brothels there, one every couple of yards. Snatches of bawdy songs ring out, and film clips from Shakespeare in Love since what he calls the "miraculous reconstruction of the Rose" informed filmmakers on the architecture of Elizabethan playhouses."In the 1590s, Southwark was the biggest entry into Europe.

I'm in contact with the history of London and it's a real labour of love."Two big glass screens slanted above the galleries beam out a sound-and- light show on the history of the Rose and its excavations against the eerily lit backdrop of the foundations. My brief was to give the public some idea of what lies beneath it. You'll never see the real Rose, since it lies under listed buildings that are protected But archaeology makes the building very accessible On site I get quite emotional. Light shining through these crudely inked but precise shapes makes 3D structures loom out of the water."Not the real thing like the Globe next door," Bill Dudley says, "but near as dammit The whole point of the exhibition is that it is underwater. The fluorescent lights give off an eerie white glow, shining through acetate film.

You won't see this film in the murky waters, but inked with magic marker, it shows stones and floorboards, ramparts and timber drains, traced exactly to a millimetre from the foundations below. Laid all over the ring of the Rose theatre foundations are electro-luminescent pads like electric blankets made of 14 different layers of plastic, all with their own underwater leads plugged into a control box, insulated so that when Chris Smith switches on the show on 14 April "it doesn't go bang," in the words of Dorian Kelly, sparks- magician from Illuminati, the company working on the lights. Dim daylight filtered through tall, arrow-slit windows makes it "like a cathedral, or a castle". He thought of Excalibur arising from the lake and created the illusion of the Rose arising from its ruins.

To him, the basement space is "dramatic, the biggest and deepest structural interior in Europe".The best magic never lets on how it's done, but a preview of the show reveals its secrets. In the same space, Dudley staged The Ship with Glaswegian actors actually launching a ship into the Clyde. There wasn't a dry eye in the place.So Bill Dudley wasn't fazed by having to stage a show inside a theatre that isn't exactly a theatre but more of a ruin covered by a preservation order in the basement of an office block To his eyes, the flooding is a "magic pond". He likes the challenge of giving unprepossessing spaces an emotional charge.When Dudley staged a play on the First World War in a derelict dockyard in Glasgow, the audience were strapped into fairground seats while actors slithered in and out of trenches cut into the floor. Scenes were shifted while dry ice rolled out of these trenches like gas and gun fire. They couldn't have bought the film set for use as an adjunct to the Globe theatre; the structure is too tall for the undercroft.