Before anything else, you read the play, sit round a table and make sure of one thing: that everyone understands every single word of each scene they are in. There is nothing more depressing than a stage of actors who have no idea what is coming out of other people’s mouths, nor even sometimes their own. This happens not infrequently. The earliest stage of rehearsals is the moment to sort this out. As you go through the play, no one is allowed to say the overall meaning of this, or the gist of that; you precisely drill down on every line, every phrase and every word, and make sure they know its exact meaning. If we are to have any theatre of meaning, we do not need to learn how to mime bottles into babies, how to monocycle, or how to scream and shout; we need to be precise and clear about language. Language is what is remarkable about us, language is what makes us and our world, not our ability to wave our arms around in the air. Dancing is a joy, singing takes us to places we could not otherwise reach, but language and being human are an intertwined genetic code creating us and our world. When we start hearing that theatre is not about language, we are often dealing with people who secretly hate it.
To keep the room sharp, there are a few rules. First, everyone is allowed to be a fool, and no question is too stupid. If something is mysterious or unknown, no one should be frightened to admit it. We all have black holes of ignorance, and we should be open about them. But just as important, everyone should be allowed to be smart. No one should be frightened of being informative and generous with knowledge. We are plagued in our contemporary theatre with a fetishising of childishness and simplicity, a worshipping of ignorance. If someone has something of interest or value to say, all should want to hear it. Most important of all, the room needs to be relaxed, and not proud. It always helps if you have a few people who have worked together before, and their relaxed manner with each other can help others worry less about being formal. If I can call one of my old colleagues something unspeakably rude on day one, it usually relaxes the air. If they can call me the same, even better. You want a room to be kind, and to be respectful of each other’s feelings, but never, never formal.
The moment when people get up from the table can be awkward. There is no solution beyond getting on with it. If the room has the right atmosphere, and if everyone feels free to try stuff out, to make mistakes and be brave, then the awkwardness passes. Making the room feel right is axiomatic. People have to allow each other space to be human and honest and foolish. Many things can help with this: a few daft stories to start the day, an attentiveness to listening, a little clowning about. Nothing relaxes the air more than laughter, and a room full of laughter is a healthy room. Tears should be able to flow freely but not indulgently. And a room needs a powerful communal bullshit detector. This starts with how people treat each other, and extends out into the work. If people start acting untruthfully, or phonily, or ostentatiously, you want the room rather than the director to let them know that it is wrong.
There was a unique technical problem with rehearsing this Hamlet. It ended up making it one of the most exciting times I have spent in a rehearsal room.
Our challenge was to rehearse not a team but a squad. To ensure that we always had cover, we had created a system where everyone was learning two, three, four, five, six or seven parts. This was in the full expectation that not everyone would last the full two years (it is still impossible to imagine the same sixteen people that left returned). We had two people to play Hamlet at the start (three by the end), three Ophelias, three Gertrudes, three Claudiuses, three Poloniuses, and by the conclusion of the tour six people who could play Horatio. We could do the play with eight, nine, ten, eleven or twelve actors. We set this up to provide cover and to spread the load of playing, and we soon realised it would be another way of keeping the play fresh. Not only would every venue be new, but also the combination of roles would surprise. In the first year of performance, the company only performed the same combination twice.
We created a carousel system, where we would rehearse a scene with one group of people, then at the end of one iteration, ask one actor to step out to be replaced by another; at the end of the next, a different actor would step out and be replaced, and so on. The scene would spin around the room, and people would jump on and off the bobbing horses. From the first, I said that everyone should be generous and selfish. If they saw someone making a choice on a line or thought that they liked, they should steal it; if they did something new, they should be prepared to give it away. Similarly, if they wanted to do something different, everyone working with them should accommodate it. The broad structure, clean and simple and driven by storytelling, was set by its directors; the details were very much up to the cast.
The work in the room became a fertile mix of imaginative commitment and critical judgement. In the moment they were in the scene, they were in it, alive to its feelings and imaginatively responding to its possibilities. The moment they were out, they were watching the same scene and assessing the truth or life of what their colleagues offered up. There were drawbacks: it was hard for the actors to gain the sheer grinding consistency which ceaseless repetition works into their bones. But the rewards were immense: it gave them an in-depth knowledge of the whole play, it gave them a mature perspective on what they were doing, and it created an atmosphere of parity and of generosity which made them a team. No one was leading the show, everyone was sharing, and all had to look out for each other. This set them up for the challenges ahead. It was also exhilarating to watch. Always the same, and always different, just as every rehearsal should be.
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What sort of production was it to be? Hamlet is one of the most misconceived plays in performance history, its original intentions now obscured by the barnacles of 400 years of theory and presumption. How do you clean off all these misconceptions and try to return it to its original colours? When the Sistine Chapel was cleaned and revealed its primary freshness, many were upset that those nice faded colours, saturated in the smoke and dirt of history, had been lost. They found the renewed work disturbingly vibrant. Part of the Globe’s remit was to reveal Shakespeare’s plays with their original vitality, and for that it was always running into the conservatism of those who like a screen of history between themselves and a classic – just as they liked the musty grime on the Sistine Chapel.
The best way to avoid a misconception is to have no conception at all. There is such a glut of ideas about how to present particular plays, it is sometimes most radical to have no idea. This is hard for many to negotiate, since without a concept, or an argument, they have nothing to talk of afterwards but the play itself, a nudity which they find embarrassing to look at. Our job at the Globe was always to tell the story cleanly, to judge the relationships impartially, and to let the language do the work. To keep true to the modesty of nature. This approach requires oceans of technique and discipline and rigour, where most conceptual work requires puddles. Yet because the work is invisible – it chooses to be – most do not notice it. We ask hard questions about the relationships, about the world and about the language, and then we work our thoughts in discreetly, always ensuring that story and language is bright and clear.
Before becoming technical about language and the verse, it is vital to remember that this is a series of scenes that present life. Without dipping into naturalism, it is important to keep in front of us Shakespeare’s particular realism. This is not a realism based on scenery, on sofas or drinks cabinets or kitchen sinks. It is a realism based on actors coming out and establishing their own reality. They believe that this is a cold rampart of a castle in Denmark, so we can believe it too. The actor playing Hamlet has to believe he is Hamlet so we can join him in the illusion. It is bare-bones realism and has to be presented with absolute conviction. With nothing to back you up, you have to look behind you and say ‘this is a castle’, and look out beyond the audience and say ‘that is Norway’, and believe that both are true. If you can do that, and grind the everyday truth of it into yourself, you can convince an audien
ce. Fingunt simul creduntque, said Tacitus – as soon as they imagine, they believe. This is the bedrock of Shakespeare’s theatre – believe it, say it, and with the participation of the audience it starts to come true.
The advantage here is that the scenes are written with a deft but tungsten-strength verismo. Whether it is that first scene on the battlements with its quick jerky questions and answers; or the torrid swirls of give and take between mother and son in the closet scene; or the awkwardness of the reluctant cleric officiating over Ophelia’s funeral; or the strained goodwill of the Players as they are told how to act by an amateur – in each of these moments and others, Shakespeare sketches a couple of quick lines and there is life: this is his great art. These moments are mysterious and unknowable as life is: they have all its meandering rhythms and peculiar upbeats. Like a breathing still life or an artful photograph, these scenes have that sense of life contained, of impermanence briefly held. This requires truthful acting, alive to each moment as it comes, not trying to force it into a scheme. Actors can be eager for patterns to help decipher plays, and audiences as well. It takes discipline to resist the inclination to fall into the seductive falsehood of patterns, and to stay true to the wonderful inconsequentiality of life. But when every detail is animated, then we start to warrant that life – not speeches, or ideas, or patterns – is at the heart of the mystery of each play.
Our actors were up for this, and relished the responsibility. The extra challenge was not just embodying the feeling of the scene, but expressing it with nothing to help as a visual signifier. Without scenery, their bodies had to do rampart, or throne room, or closet, or graveyard. Each of them expressed with a different physical energy: Ladi was a boxer briefly, and has some of that watchfulness; Rawiri is all buffo comedy and prop-forward, bull-like energy; Miranda has a proscenium grace; Jen is a slip of a thing and looks like a delicate blossom. It was impossible to force them all to be the same, or to adopt a unified movement scheme, without bleeding the democracy and humanity out of the event. Each in their own way learnt how to occupy the empty space and fill it with their own imagination. And thus, with theatre’s natural complicity, ours.
As well as the life of a play, it is important to seek out its wit. This is not a matter of looking for laughs; it is finding the irony and the comic sense of each particular play and releasing it. When you get to know a new friend, you spend a little time winkling out their humour, finding out what sparks the twinkle in their eye (if you find nothing, then walk away); in the same way, you look for what curls the smile of a play. There was not far to look with Hamlet. No clown appears until the arrival of the Gravediggers, but up to that point an abundance of humour has spilt from the Prince himself. To a degree, he is the fool who is missing from his own play.
His very first line, ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’, is a thousand things, but it is also a serviceable gag. It is clear from his first engagements with Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that their friendships are based on sparring wit and competitive funnies. Hamlet himself is a bright generous wit, throwaway pearls spilling out of him. Compare him with any of the other major tragic figures. A night of Live at the Apollo with a bill of Lear, Othello, Anthony, Coriolanus and Macbeth would be big on heckles and short on laughs. But Hamlet could hold his own. Especially if his wit is played as giveaway and involuntary as it should be. If it settles into mordancy or sarcasm, then you’ve got someone telling you he’s the most intelligent person in the room, and we can all go home.
Humour ripples through the play. Polonius is a comic creation whose speeches have a not-entirely-under-the-character’s-control Shavian irony. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern travel a darkly comic journey from two enthusiastic boobies on a free holiday, to the heart of a corroding state, and on to their eventual deaths. Hamlet gives some of the best comic advice ever delivered to the Players, so he is clearly not only fun in himself, but a student of comedy. The play within the play, or at least the lines that Hamlet has written with some clumsy moral lessons for his mother, are so eye-wateringly bad, their intention must be humorous.
When the clowns do arrive in the form of the Gravediggers, they have deliverable material and a deadpan vaudeville exchange with Hamlet worthy of a partnership that has worked long years round the provinces. When Hamlet is brought face to face with death, it is with the skull of a comedian. It is the death of laughter that he registers as the most switching irony:
Alas, poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now. . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
It is a vivid and abiding image – a boy shrieking with laughter charging around on the back of a clown. It is a laughter that has gone now, but we know it was once there.
Even after this episode, the humour has not gone from the play, since right at the death Shakespeare throws on the campest and most ludicrous colour in the play, the flamboyant and futile Osric. This is not an inexorable tonal drift towards death; this is a sudden firework display of character comedy. At exactly the wrong moment. Shakespeare doesn’t just pull the rug of expectation away, he exposes the bottomless pit beneath it – the Chekhovian existential pit that always opens up when you get stuck with a weapons-grade bore.
Observing these things in rehearsal, delighting in the comic invention and observation the actors brought to the room, was not playing it for laughs, it was observing what is there, and allowing it to breathe. It oxygenated the room and allowed us to understand more of the play. It released the relationships and hence some of the pain at its centre. It ran counter to an imposed orthodoxy about how tragedies should be remorselessly tragic, but the Globe, I’m glad to say, had always bucked that orthodoxy. Happily, it had always been at war with all that Victorian crapola about suffering being allied to virtue, seriousness being good for you, and joy bad.
A year or so later, I was completely lost in Addis Ababa, a town of swirling complexity which defies conventional map-reading. I ended up walking along a motorway for a while, then speared off into what I took to be a park. Somehow I found myself in the presidential compound. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by dogs and men with guns, all shouting and barking with enthusiasm at the shambling foreigner. They saw me off. The compound, a sprawl of manicured acres, sat high on a hill looking out over a wide vista of tin slums, wooden sheds and half-built/half-broken blocks. Starving figures sat propped against the railings on the other side of the road. There was something obscene and desperate about the contrast. ‘You have to laugh,’ I thought aimlessly to myself, a bit of Somerset wisdom which has never left me. Just as I thought it, I looked up to see a roadside billboard garishly advertising ‘The First Indigenous Laughter School in Africa’. It was presided over by the World Laughter Master, Belachew Girma, a man who has broken all known records for continuous laughter. Research revealed that he holds regular classes to teach people how to laugh continuously for hours on end. Ethiopia’s very own Yorrick. I have thought of him every time since, whenever I encounter the po-faced sternness of those who say that tragedies must be tragedies and laughter can never walk through them.
The attitude is not just about laughter; it is more about spirit. Listen to the energy in that ‘Speak the speech’ exhortation. This is not a moany boy; it is an exhilarated fire of breathless anticipation falling out of a hot-wired brain. It is an instruction for acting generally, but also for this play in particular. It is a call for wit and brio – the French cavalry cry of ‘À l’attaque!’ In a 1960’s arts programme, an unashamedly old-fashioned bit of television, Orson Welles and Peter O’Toole discuss Hamlet, quaffing whisky and chain-smoking cigarettes with sixties cool. While O’Toole proposes a textually underfunded theory that Gertrude is a lesbian, Welles propounds something more interesting. That the principal fact about Hamlet is th
at he is a ‘genius’. Where Othello’s central characteristic is that he is a black man in a white man’s world, King Lear’s that he is a tyrant and a bad father, Anthony’s an old soldier, Hamlet’s is that he is a bona fide genius. A Mozartian prodigy of thought and feeling, out of step with his own world, who cannot help spilling thought and insight. It is a very Wellesian insight, but a true one, and a significant instruction for the whole play.
Central to the playing is the way we handle the verse. Much has been written, much spoken and much argued over in relation to how best to treat Shakespeare’s verse. On the one hand there are the iambic fundamentalists, who believe passionately that every foot (two syllables) should be stressed the same way with a clean de-dum stress on the second syllable at all times, and that the end of every line should be given a light pause. At the other end of the spectrum are those who don’t give a toss, and who mutter, shout and maul the verse in any way they like. Both are criminal, the latter deserving of a longer sentence. In the middle is our resident guru at the Globe, Giles Block, who believes that the stresses are flexible, that there is a form in the verse, and that observing that form, and its hidden music, is the best way to understand the intentions behind the thought.
A year later, and a long way from the Globe, I was sitting in a nomadic tent in Hargeisa, being taught the many forms of Somali verse. The highest literary poetry, as exemplified by their leading poet Hadrawi, is called Gabri, with a sophisticated metrical system and definite rules of scansion. There is another form for warriors on horses, a form that follows the movement of the horse; a poetry for putting up a house; one for women for weaving; another for taking camels to water; even a specific form for milking goats. Each form you can recite for hours on end to entertain and entrance yourself while you sink into the rhythm of words and work together. Some experts say of Shakespeare’s iambic verse that it relates to footfall, and to our natural pace of walking; some that it has an intimate relationship with the heartbeat; and others with the pace at which we breathe. Whichever, what is plainly apparent, and made clear in the variety of Somali forms, is that there is a physiological relationship between verse and our bodies. It does not live only in our heads; it relates to how we move and how we live.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 4