There are Somali forms for courtship, where potential lovers meet and recite to each other. They compete with rival lovers for who is the best within that verse form. They test companionship of soul and sex with potential partners through how well rhythms and inventiveness commingle. It was thrilling to hear these examples from a culture that is still genuinely oral, just as it was in Shakespeare’s day. President Obama himself talked of the similarities between Shakespeare and rap, and how the new Broadway hit Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda is Shakespearean in its verbal inventiveness and in its scope. Rap is a great indicator for Shakespeare in the freedom it affords. It has a matrix of musical rules, which are there not to inhibit, but to release. Rhyming in rap, as in Shakespeare, is there not to make people freeze, but to delight in language and its possibilities.
As far as possible, I remain a verse agnostic, not adhering to any particular system. What matters is that there is clarity and wholeness in the saying of the verse. That the energy is the sound of something flying swift and bright past you, fast as a kingfisher on a bright summer’s day, that makes you want to follow it, join it and buckle yourself to it. The complexity in the language is something to be relished – it is forged from brightness and excitement.
Actors get that or they don’t. Some can hear the pitch and the music of a play, almost as if they have a mystic sense, some clue to the red shift in the life of the writer which occasioned the particular music of the play. As if they can hear that event, whatever it was, and understand how energy is still rippling out from it. It is impossible to teach; it is something innate in the stomach of the actor. They can hear it from each other and imitate it as they would learn a song, but it can’t be taught. John Dougall, whom I have worked with often, is an actor of this sort. I have usually cast him in the early scenes of a play, so that throughout rehearsals, at the read-through, when people first stand up, when they first do runs, at the dress and on the first night, he has hit the right groove and, like a tuning fork, set a tone and a pitch for others to follow.
I have a physical allergy to attending workshops of any kind, and almost go into anaphylactic shock at the prospect of running one. However, about halfway through the tour, I was bullied into doing one in Ethiopia at their National Theatre. I sat in a shabby room with broken windows with a group of actors, someone banging together wooden scaffolding outside and someone else plaiting together strings of red onions in a corner. The actors told me of their theatre, its history and traditions. I asked them to recite a little of their traditional verse. It was a joy to hear, exhaling a coffee richness in their mouths. The mode of delivery was one of separation from self and from each other. They went outside themselves to recite, looking at the floor or above people’s heads. In the time available there was little to do, but they wanted to speak some Shakespeare, and they wanted to speak it in English. I gave them the briefest of talks on the iambic rhythm, and then we went through just two lines: ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer. . .’
It was hard at first to get them to slough off the effect of having watched too many movies, and they clung to a casual modern idiom. I encouraged them not to force individual words too hard, nor to run words together with an affected casualness, but to find the gently propulsive forward-walking rhythm of each thought, and to express it from their mouths into the room. To observe and relish that steady path into a thought. Their thrill at handling the language was immediate, and the simplicity of those essential six syllables translated swiftly. I encouraged them to say it looking into each other’s eyes, and to enjoy the bold ease of that. Again there were inhibitions. If you are not looking directly at someone, it is acting; if you are, it can feel like lying. They got over the other side of this and enjoyed the direct address, the clear engagement and the simple talking. There was a warm, happy energy in the room, and I noticed for the first time what lurks within the iambic rhythm – a hidden hope. As each gentle upturned stress occurred and passed from person to person, it pulsed a discreet energy into the speaker and listener, and beyond into the room. It gave a lift. I left the room in Addis Ababa with a better understanding of the nature of verse than I had achieved before. It is talking with invention, and with energy, and with a steady hope.
Just as each actor found their own way to make the scenes come alive, so they arrived at their own understanding of how to handle the verse. The seniors Keith, John and Miranda all had long years of Shakespeare with the RSC and others under their belts. The music was safely contained within them, so they could modulate delicately and freely within that music. Rawiri had much experience too, but a more declaratory style, which, together with his openness of face and heart, has a massive charm. Most of the young ones were finely tuned drama-school graduates who had an appetite for Shakespeare which was its own enchantment. There was a spectrum within their approach: Tommy has an easy conversational naturalness; Phoebe began as presenting a little more; Jen tended to the demure and the shy, and being the least experienced with the verse had the most to learn. But like any proper team of actors they lifted each other up. They watched each other and stole a little of this from him and copied a little of that from her. The last thing we wanted was an absolute consistency. A group of actors is not supposed to be a faceless unit; it is supposed to be a team of individuals, and by the end of rehearsals (thank the lord), a squad is what we had.
They needed to be. The conditions in which they made the play work over the next two years would have torn a fragile group to shreds and patches. I watched it in front of 200 ambassadors sitting at large desks in the UN; in front of a reluctant audience in Djibouti, with the waves of the Red Sea crashing loudly behind; to 2,000 restless students in an acoustic horror house in Phnom Penh; in a hotel ballroom in Hargeisa; in a tin shed in a Syrian refugee camp; and in a Roman amphitheatre in Amman. Everywhere they went, no matter the conditions, they tried to make the play come to life in front of whoever was watching. There were more extraordinary places I missed: 4,000 people crammed into a square outside a cathedral in Mérida, Yucatán; a roundabout in the rain in Bucharest; a bar in a Cameroon refugee camp; in a rock stadium before the crashing Pacific in Chile. Wherever they were, however impossible the conditions, or however speedy the set-up, they had each other, and they had the gentle support of each line of verse, its embedded rhythm tenderly placing a supporting palm on the base of their spines, the place where fear and exhaustion resides, and with the lightest touch it kept them upright and somehow kept them moving forward, into the story and towards the audience.
At one of the most difficult moments of the journey – one actor very ill, another about to lose a close relation, another nursing a great friend towards a young death, a stage manager having lost his mother-in-law, Paris having just suffered the Bataclan massacre which made everyone nervous about home, and with everyone blitzed by exhaustion – the tour for a moment looked threadbare and fragile. Everyone was finding ways of coping, but it was clear that we were not flying on full tanks. I wrote to them:
These are tough times. The play can help, your astonishing generosity to each other can help, the knowledge that you are doing something very special can help, the fact that beside all these personal heartbutts, and these more public tragedies, a lot of people are investing hope in what you are doing, that can help as well, but above all. . .
Be kind to each other, and keep putting one foot in front of another.
That is what Shakespeare’s plays teach us to do.
11 Belarus, Minsk
Janka Kupala National Academic Theatre
22 May 2014
12 Ukraine, Kiev
Mystetskyi Arsenal
24 May
13 Moldova, Chisşinău
National Teatrul ‘Eugène Ionesco
27 May
14 Romania, Bucharest
St Anthony Square
30–31 May
15 Bulgaria, Varna
Stoyan Bachvarov Dramatic Thea
tre
3 June
16 Macedonia, Skopje
Macedonian National Theatre
Macedonia, Bitola
Heraclea Lyncestis
5 June
6 June
17 Albania, Tirana
Teatri Kombètar
7 June
18 Kosovo, Pristina
Teatri Kombètar
10 June
19 Montenegro, Podgorica
Montenegrin National Theatre
12 June
20 Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo
National Theatre
15 June
21 Croatia, Zagreb
Zagreb Youth Theatre
17 June
22 Serbia, Belgrade
National Theatre in Belgrade
Serbia, Čortanovci
Vila Stankovic
18 June
19 June
23 Hungary, Budapest
Margaret Island Open-Air Theatre
21 June
24 Slovakia, Bratislava
Slovak National Theatre
24 June
25 Czech Republic, Prague
Prague Castle
25–26 June
26 Cyprus, Limassol
Kourion Amphitheatre
5 July
3
SETTING OUT THROUGH THE BALTICS
HAMLET What players are they?
ROSENCRANTZ Even those you were wont to take delight in, the tragedians of the city.
Act 2, Scene 2
STANDING ON AN OLD WOODEN jetty washed grey-green by the sea in Ystad, in the south-eastern corner of Sweden. Murmurs burble from a nearby restaurant sitting on rotting stilts above the water, and small-town noises trickle towards the shore from the miniature metropolis. The quiet of the Baltic in front and the hills behind, as the sun goes down beyond them, is softly forceful. It is broken by the rude throat-clearing of a ferry’s foghorn as it sweeps into the harbour. Another ferry emerging from the port answers. They croak at each other cacophonously for a while. Sweden to Poland, and Poland to Sweden. The passage cuts a line across the Baltic Sea and the Hanseatic world, a stretch of water long used for trade, for war, and for travelling actors. It is easy to imagine from centuries past swifter and lighter vessels carrying a cargo of new stories from the London stage.
A short walk behind me is a beautiful late nineteenth-century theatre, built in tidy proportion for the single-room plays of Ibsen and Strindberg. On first sight earlier that morning, I had thought it too domestic a space for the open expanse of our play, but the focus is so clean and the acoustic so simple, it proves a claustrophobic thrill to play, forcing up to the surface all the family poison, like an Ibsen three-acter. We are giving our fiercest and tightest performances thus far. Members of my office have flown out for the occasion. The logic behind this is sound: to stay connected with the company and to reward colleagues for their hard work. The result is hen/stag-night mayhem. I’ve stepped out for a little quiet, being not quite in mayhem mood, yet.
The sea and the ships remind me of the first stage of our Hamlet journey. Shortly after the premiere, the company left London on a suitable mode of transport. Gathering just beneath Tower Bridge on the Thames, surrounded by a couple of hundred well-wishers, the company boarded a small tall-boat and set off for Amsterdam. It was manned and helmed by taciturn Danish Captain Haddock lookie-likies. There was champagne and waving and hugging. A laconic Northern actor disconnected us from the jetty, threw the rope off and uttered a drily minimal ‘Bye’. A boat bearing two television crews sped alongside for a while and then tailed off. Then there was silence. The high spirits gave way to a settled calm as the boat navigated its way down the Thames and out into the North Sea.
We awoke the next morning to a calm sea and moved forward wrapped in a caul of mist. People sat quiet and still on deckchairs, they lounged together in the netting, they climbed one by one up to the crow’s nest as if it was an act of anointing. Later that afternoon, we found the coast of Holland and spent four hours negotiating our way through the broad Dutch canals and rivers, lulled by a North Sea quiet broken only by the putter of the ship’s engine. In the evening, we pulled in behind the train station in Amsterdam. The expectation may have been of a 24-hour party, a sea-borne bacchanal, but the opposite had happened. A peaceful journey, untroubled by wind or wave, stillness moving through stillness, had bonded the company together in a silence more profound than any amount of exuberance could achieve.
Throughout our journeys, and in planning them, we talked of their correspondence to the first journeys that Shakespeare’s plays had made as they sailed from London to take their chance in the world, carried in the memory of actors. The most celebrated instance of this early promulgation by water involves Hamlet and is problematic. It was the iconic performance of Hamlet on board the Red Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1608. According to the notebooks of their captain William Keeling, they performed Hamlet twice in the course of their journey around the globe between 1607 and 1610. The crew, many of whom had no doubt seen the show at the Globe, used the mnemonic capacity of their age and stitched a show together for a group of visiting dignitaries from the African mainland. The exoticism of this – at such a distance from home, and so soon after its premiere – leads many, including us, to blazon it as proof of the speed at which Hamlet moved into the world. We accept the internationalism of Shakespeare as a commonplace, but assume it’s a modern development; in fact, it’s as old as the plays themselves. Yet a historical shadow falls across the performance. The Red Dragon was one of the first ships of the East India Company. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare, the most pervasive soft-power influence of all time, with the great-great-grandfather of all psychopathic corporations is an uneasy one.
Many make much of the historical ripples set running by this incident. It throws up a slew of questions about whether Shakespeare is only the innocent fellow-traveller riding along beside the spreading blush of British pink colouring the world’s map. But such thoughts rarely account for the parallel historical movement, which is the freedom with which these plays travelled elsewhere beyond the English Channel. Had Shakespeare’s plays travelled only where the English language travelled, it might be justifiable to raise an eyebrow. But, in fact, Hamlet was quite quickly all over northern Europe. It was carried by actors.
Known collectively as the Comedians of England, these performers were a late sixteenth/early seventeenth-century phenomenon, with as many as 200 employed across the Continent. What drove them to seek pastures new? Sometimes they were simply told to – the Earl of Leicester’s Men accompanied their patron on his progress through Utrecht, Leyden and The Hague in 1585, when the Earl was appointed commander of the English troops in the Netherlands. Frequently it was because they could make more money on the Continent. The economic instinct is a powerful one for an actor. There are almost always too many actors and too few jobs.
The kind of theatre presented in a German market square would have been distinct from what was presented at the Globe. The moniker ‘Comedians of England’ provides a clue as to their playing style. There is evidence the plays were substantially cut, and that broad farce, music and gymnastic feats were highlighted over delicate psychological acting. Hamlet, as we can surmise from contemporary accounts and from early translations, would probably have run at about an hour, with an extended dumbshow, and with incidents like the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern played out in graphic fight sequences rather than reported. The kings of the companies were the clowns, who had to be bilingual so they could crack local jokes and bridge complicated narrative jumps with a little live storytelling. The resident Gdańsk clown went under the moniker Pickleherring, and a German one called himself Hans Stockfish, which tends to imply that German humour has been something of a historical constant.
We know the names of almost a hundred English actors working across Europe during this period, acting alone as house entertainer, travelling with companies, or joini
ng local outfits throughout Scandinavia, the Lowlands, northern Germany, Austria, Bohemia and the Baltics. (France was left almost completely off the circuit, principally because of its Catholicism.) Amongst that list of actors are some distinguished names, including Ben Jonson and (from Shakespeare’s company) Will Kempe, George Bryan and Thomas Pope. The last two both spent time working in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, which is a substantial clue as to how Shakespeare knew so much about the tide-splashed rocks without and the cold stone gloom within. Many question how Shakespeare knew so much of the places he wrote about, while forgetting the most powerful transmitter of information in history – conversation. Bryan and Pope, having frozen the tips of their fingers off for a couple of years entertaining the Danish court, were probably never short of a memory or an anecdote, and it is little surprise that Shakespeare’s evocation of the wind-whipped, forbidding grandeur of Elsinore is so accurate.
English actors were popular not for their delivery of text, but for the physicality of their performance. An Englishman, Fynes Moryson, travelling in Germany in 1618 remembered a group of English players, ‘having neither a Complete number of Actors, nor any good Apparell, nor any ornament of the stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a word they said, flocked wonderfully to see their gestures and action’. English plays were popular because the London theatres of the time were play-factories, turning out thrilling history after lurid bloodbath after psychological thriller after rom-com-sex-farce. One of the first plays in German is Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Brother Murder), a radically cut version of Hamlet, though essentially the same play. A German noble, Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Cassel (they don’t make titles like that any more), was so enamoured of the English theatre that he kept his own company of English performers. They toured under his patronage and played in a theatre he had specially built for them. Landgrave Maurice even travelled to London to commission new plays from English writers. This dashing and quixotic figure could be a neglected inspiration for Hamlet. We now see Prince Hamlet and his joy at the arrival of the Players in Denmark in a new light: the scenes around the play-within-a-play are not only a celebration of his ludic ingenuity, but also of his internationalism. When he welcomes the Players, for his contemporary audience he would not be an Englishman welcoming an English troupe, he would be a Dane welcoming an international troupe. Thus Hamlet becomes an early beacon of cosmopolitanism and a reflection of his own world.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 5