Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,

  They kill us for their sport.

  But it isn’t the gods who do the killing in King Lear. The wanton boys are men and women, and so are the flies. When John got fed up of his tiny, rubbery Fool, he swatted her, picked her up by the scruff of her neck and put her on a hook on the back of a door, where she hung limply until he needed her again. It was no surprise to hear at the end of the play that somewhere along the line, unremarked and ignored, she’d died, hanged, without even being given a death scene.

  Cordelia’s murder is the last of the play’s cruelties, but her reconciliation with her father is almost as troubling as the violence that severs them. The play looks at the love between parent and child and finds it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Lear’s downfall is that he treats his three daughters almost literally as his flesh and blood: he expects them to be as obedient to his will as his own body. His two elder daughters would rather destroy him completely than bend to his will; his youngest flirts briefly with autonomy, but when she returns to rescue him, he wants to spend the rest of his life in a prison cell with her, singing like birds in a cage, and can hardly wait to have her all to himself again:

  Have I caught thee?

  He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,

  And fire us hence like foxes.

  He has learned nothing and there is little to relieve his self-absorption: he’s caught her and he isn’t going to let her go. It doesn’t occur to him that she might have feelings of her own about being incarcerated with him. Not for the last time, I looked for grace in Shakespeare and found it undermined by his ruthless honesty.

  I suspect I short-changed anybody who came looking for magnificence. The romantic critical tradition may be dead, but the attachment of audiences to it dies hard, possibly because it has morphed into the formula behind the Hollywood blockbuster. Most superheroes would have no trouble answering to Hazlitt’s description of Lear’s mind:

  a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.

  But the protagonists of King Lear are less buffeted by the furious waves than adrift in a senseless moral wilderness. Although there was an undeniable thrill in hearing John’s great voice defy the elements, there was no escaping the absurdity of his defiance.

  John Wood was the reason I did King Lear and The Tempest, and he was reason enough, but both productions suffered from a lack of specificity in their stage worlds. These days, I could not stage King Lear without making clearer choices about Lear’s kingdom, and about the systems that underpin his power as a king as well as a father. And I’d want to know a lot more about the poor, naked wretches whose lives he finally starts to think about when he’s forced to join them.

  Shakespeare never conceives of his characters shorn of the physical reality of the world around them. In 2009, I directed Racine’s Phèdre, which does exactly that. The French neoclassical theatre, in self-conscious imitation of the Greek, reduces suffering to its essentials. Phèdre’s every waking thought is consumed by the need to take her stepson into her bed, and the subsequent need to conceal it from her husband. The intensity of the tragic experience requires a single-minded focus on the central action alone. Nothing else matters in Racine’s Greece.

  In Shakespeare’s Egypt, there’s time for every kind of diversion. Halfway through Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra asks for music, “moody food of us that trade in love.” Then she changes her mind, and decides to play billiards instead. But the woman she wants to play with has a sore arm, and suggests that she’d be better off playing with her eunuch. All Shakespeare’s plays are steeped in the mess of life, and by the time I staged Hamlet in 2010, they seemed to me not to respond well to the kind of staging that aims to abstract them back to their essentials.

  Most British shows start in a set designer’s studio. Directors in the rest of Europe develop their ideas about a play with a dramaturg, whose job is to be the intellectual conscience of a production. We are furtive enough about our intellectual foundations to be embarrassed even by the dramaturg’s job title: hardly any British theatres have one. When I direct Shakespeare, I smuggle in Peter Holland, now professor in Shakespeare Studies at Notre Dame University, who taught me when I was at Cambridge. With him I talk about the play, as I used to talk in his room in Trinity Hall; but with the designer I start to talk about how to do it.

  Vicki Mortimer, who designed Hamlet, works in a tiny, freezing studio in an old factory on the Wandsworth Road, with high, cracked windows. She’s never designed a West End musical: if she had, she’d have premises as warm as those of three of my other frequent collaborators, Bob Crowley, Tim Hatley and Mark Thompson, whose studios are as elegant as their sets. But the process is the same, whatever the surroundings. We read the play to each other: I cast myself in the best parts. We talk about what it means, and how we imagine it taking shape. We collect photos and paintings. The designer starts to sketch, then to build a rough 1:50 model of the set in white card. There can be twenty different models before we settle on the one that makes it to the beautiful 1:25 final version.

  There are one or two highly strung, combative theatre designers: I occasionally came across them as director of the National. As a director of plays, I’ve worked only with the serene majority. Vicki, imperturbable even during the chaos of a technical rehearsal, can take a play quietly apart as the wind rattles the windows of her studio.

  Although I wanted a Hamlet saturated in the indignities and ambiguities of the real world, I was taken with the idea that Elsinore is less a concrete image of the world than a series of theatrical images: thematically expressive rather than suggestive of a real centre of power. I remembered a Hamlet where the stage walls themselves dissolved at the touch, the director and designer responding to the play’s febrile uncertainty about the solidity of objective reality, unfolding it through a series of theatrical coups. I went to Berlin to see the famous 2008 Hamlet directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Hamlet was a fat-suited clown, rapping, ad-libbing, organising an audience singalong. The show started in the rain, with a dumbshow of old Hamlet’s funeral. Hamlet stared into the grave for what seemed like an age, then fell in. As he clambered out, he started to eat the mud: a savage and dangerous plunge into what the play has to say about madness, decay and death. Mud, it must be said, is something of a constant in contemporary German theatre. The text was heavily cut, rearranged and rewritten, and was played by six actors, Gertrude and Ophelia doubling up, so the consequence of Hamlet’s misogyny was to erase the distinction between his mother and his lover. It was sensational.

  One way of connecting Shakespeare to the audience is to treat the stage with a poetic freedom analogous to Shakespeare’s verse at its most exploratory. Many of the plays sink under the weight of too literal a response to the world they purport to represent. Whatever my reservations about the cool abstraction of my RSC Tempest, at least it wasn’t Treasure Island without the parrot. In many of his romantic comedies, Shakespeare plays with the idea that the experience of love remakes reality. Think about A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night, and you’re very quickly imagining on stage a high-fantastical world shaped by fancy.

  And yet: the world of Twelfth Night is also a world of late-Tudor gentility, a world with a strict domestic hierarchy where fancy is undermined by cakes, ale and box hedges. A director, pulled between the solid reality of Shakespeare’s world and the poetic freedom of his imagination, must balance the theatrical virtues of each and discover the point of maximum personal conviction. With Vicki building and rebuilding the Hamlet world in white card, I thought I could better help an audience hear Hamlet’s internal debate about theatricality and truth, and experience his struggles with his idea of himself, if it
experienced with him the world that has brought him to his crisis. I wanted to root him in a coherent world more than I wanted to create a theatrical commentary on it.

  So Vicki binned mountains of cardboard, and we moved on to asking ourselves what and when was Hamlet’s world. Staging King Lear, I thought there was no right time, no wrong time, tried to blend past and present, found some timeless middle way. Timeless, I think now, means insipid. It means that those behind the production haven’t thought hard enough about the play, or that they’re scared of committing to a partial vision of it. Any vision of the play is bound to be partial. To aspire to anything else is folly or arrogance.

  Hamlet was certainly conceived as a contemporary state-of-the-nation play about Elizabethan England: a surveillance state, a totalitarian monarchy with a highly developed spy network. Elizabeth I exerted control through an internal security system that must have impinged on everyone who watched its first performance. At Elsinore, you can’t reveal yourself without risking your life. Everything is observed, everything is suspect, no social gesture is trustworthy. Polonius the spymaster sends one of his staff to spy even on his son, Laertes; he forces his daughter Ophelia to spy on her lover, Hamlet; and meanwhile Hamlet’s oldest friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are hired by the king to spy on Hamlet.

  Shakespeare’s audience knew exactly what the play was talking about. Many of Shakespeare’s colleagues at some time or another found themselves behind bars for saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person at the wrong time. There’s an unimpeachable argument for creating on stage a vivid image of the late-Elizabethan world that gave birth to the play. But that, I said to Vicki, would rob the National’s audience of something that Shakespeare’s audience took for granted. Hamlet does not ask us to marvel at a strange world, but to recognise our own.

  Few of us in Britain today can pretend that we know what it’s like to live in a security state, but I wanted to create on stage a world that would be immediately and viscerally recognisable as a world where you put your life in danger by saying the wrong thing. In all Shakespeare’s great tragedies, the personal and the political reflect each other: the internal and social lives of the tragic hero are inextricably linked. Hamlet is paralysed as much by the barrier the state puts in the way of anyone knowing anyone else, as he is by his desperate search to know what’s going on inside himself. As Elsinore slowly took shape in white card on a model of the Olivier stage, it started to resemble a post-Soviet Central European dictatorship: a baroque palace, now the centre of a modern security state, kitted out with the hardware of the security state, and inhabited by the kind of people who know what it’s like to live in terror of their neighbours.

  “Who’s there?” is the terror-struck first line of the play, though the sentry who shouts it is terrified not of his neighbour but of the ghost he saw on the battlements of Elsinore the previous night. The second sentry turns the question back on the first: “Nay answer me! Stand and unfold yourself!”

  In other words: never mind who’s there, show me who you are. It turns out to be what Hamlet wants from everyone around him. It is what he wants from himself. He spends the whole play struggling with himself, trying to unfold himself to himself. He tries in vain to persuade those around him—his mother, his girlfriend, his friends, the ghost of his father—to reveal themselves fully to him. For those involved in the performance of Shakespeare’s plays, “unfold yourself!” is how to act them.

  It is never true of a play that all the answers are available in the text. It isn’t how plays work. Novels can give you everything you need to know, but plays are only dimly detectable until they are performed. It is primarily through the imagination, craft and personality of the actor that you encounter Hamlet, Gertrude or the gravedigger. Even Shakespeare’s great parts ask more questions than they answer, and require an actor to fill in fascinating gaps left quite deliberately. His smaller parts, however striking, often leave to the actor almost all the work of creating a character with a real biography.

  Rory Kinnear was playing Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode when I realised I’d found an actor whose intellect measured up to Hamlet’s, without whom I would never have dreamed of doing the play. In George Etherege’s Restoration comedy, Rory sang, played the piano, and made short work of Sir Fopling’s contorted syntax, but his outrageous ostentation could not conceal his bone-deep insecurity and loneliness. A couple of weeks into the run, I asked him to call by my office, and before he’d had a chance to settle on the black leather sofa, I asked him to play first Hamlet, and then Iago, and whether he’d mind warming up by playing Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy.

  I have often found myself enjoying an actor in rehearsal so much that I start to imagine other plays we can do together. But Sir Fopling Flutter is monumentally stupid; Hamlet and Iago aren’t. So when I heard myself persuading Rory to play them, I took myself by surprise almost as much as him. I’d learned to beware the baleful look with which he greeted glib or lazy ideas. He looked mournfully at me now, as if Hamlet and Iago were two more of them, his suspicion a reminder of the melancholy and introspection he’d found even in the most ridiculous fop in the repertoire. Eventually the look evaporated, and he said yes. As he left the office he may have been thinking of the time he spent at the National as a small boy, hanging out in his dad’s dressing room: Roy Kinnear, the great comic actor, died when Rory was ten.

  Simon Russell Beale, another practised Shakespearean, once said that acting is three-dimensional literary criticism. I’m not sure I agree with him. The literary critic reveals the text and the circumstances that gave birth to it. The actor reveals the play, for which the text is only the starting point. Rory uncovered things that Shakespeare left out of Hamlet, things that would have made the play last as long as War and Peace if he’d put them in, like what really went on between Hamlet and Ophelia before the play starts. That things have gone on is plain from the pile of letters she returns to him. “I did love you once,” he says, though he never says why he’s stopped loving her; and I’ve seen it done so sardonically that it’s impossible to believe. And a couple of lines later, he says, “I loved you not.” Which doesn’t make it any easier to know whether he did, though it’s a familiar contradiction: lovers, like Lear and his daughters, can love and not love simultaneously. In any event, it feels like there’s a missing scene near the start of the play for Hamlet and Ophelia that allows you to experience how they are with each other before things start to go wrong. You don’t see them together until he’s apparently mad.

  But a good Hamlet will unavoidably reveal himself as much as he reveals Hamlet, and it is in the combination of the two that the text comes alive. Rory believed “I did love you once,” so we believed him, but he trusted Ophelia as little as he trusted anyone else at Elsinore, as little as he trusted himself. In five words, he told you what could have taken Tolstoy four chapters. What he didn’t tell you, of course, was what Ophelia felt about him. She’s manipulated by her father and by the king, forced to return Hamlet’s love letters to him, abused by Hamlet and neglected by Shakespeare: her only soliloquy is almost entirely about Hamlet, revealing little about herself beyond her dejection. But although Ruth Negga had less to work with than Rory, she revealed a hard core of integrity in Ophelia, and her madness was less the result of shock at her father’s death than the intolerable tension between what she was and the role she was forced to play.

  Shakespeare’s plays require an actor always to consider what is not in them as much as what is. And, approached without preconceptions, they also turn out to be not completely trustworthy about what’s actually there. Actors can never entirely trust what their characters say about themselves to other characters, nor what other characters say about them. Although Hamlet is painfully honest about himself, he contradicts himself about whether he loved Ophelia because he carries within him both love and its absence. Stage tradition has it that he adored his father, and there’s evidence for it in his brief eulogy to him:<
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  He was a man, take him for all in all;

  I shall not look upon his like again.

  But one of the most striking things about the scene between Hamlet and his father’s ghost is that the ghost utters not one affectionate word towards his son. The old king is consumed entirely with his own situation, which is understandable enough. He has only recently been murdered by his brother and is now compelled to watch from Purgatory as the same brother beds his wife, under which circumstances we might all find ourselves obsessed by thoughts of revenge. But the absence of anything recognisable as a bond between father and son led us to examine the whole nature of their relationship. The old king was a brutal warrior: there’s admiring talk of all the smiting he did when he was alive. Hamlet is a thirty-year-old graduate student who has been absent from his father’s court for many years. They have little in common, and it is the gulf between them, we thought, more than the bond between them, that consumes Hamlet, and is one of the things that makes it impossible for him to take immediate action in response to the ghost’s demands for revenge.

  Sometimes, in rehearsal, you notice that the text doesn’t necessarily support what you assume to be centuries of performance practice. In the scene between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude, at the height of their impassioned argument with each other, the ghost reappears to remind Hamlet not to forget what he’s been told to do. “Alas, he’s mad,” says his mother, as Hamlet struggles to control himself. “Whereon do you look?” she asks, apparently unable to see what Hamlet sees.

  But when you think about it, you’re forced to wonder why Gertrude can’t see the ghost. Everybody else who comes across him sees him perfectly clearly. Horatio sees him. The sentries on the battlements see him. Which led us to ask whether it’s possible that Gertrude does see the ghost, but can’t bring herself to admit to Hamlet that she can see him, so she lies. And once whoever is playing Gertrude has decided that she’s lying, she must ask herself why she’s lying, and whether she’s a habitual liar. There are good answers to both questions. She’s lying because, even if she wasn’t complicit in the murder of her husband, she knows exactly what happened, and like most of the rest of the court, she knows she has married the murderer. Maybe, like the Gertrude in John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius, she betrayed her husband with Claudius long before the murder. Maybe her whole story in the play is underpinned by a consuming guilt about what she has done, or at least has allowed to happen, which was why Clare Higgins’s Gertrude covered up her horror at the sight of her husband’s ghost, and continued to talk to her son as if she had seen nothing. For those who knew the play, it was an opportunity to watch it as if they’d never seen it before. Although there were a few, inevitably, who had seen it before, as Clare turned out not to be the first Gertrude to see the ghost. There are few ideas about Shakespeare that someone hasn’t already had, though it’s always worth having them again as there is nothing more vivid on stage than a scene played with the conviction that comes from its participants’ own sense of discovery.