Hamlet is a play full of a broad international awareness. Hamlet, a Dane, attends university at Wittenberg in what is now Germany. Laertes travels to find his fortune in Paris. Fortinbras travels from Norway to pass through Denmark on his way to fight in Poland. Hamlet is sent away in the Fourth Act to England, which is in a client relationship with Denmark. He escapes his fate there through the intercession of some pirates, and pirates are the first and last word in internationalism. This is not a narrow or insular play. It is in its geography a Hanseatic play, a league of countries surrounding the Baltic, held together by trade, by conquest, and for a short while by the touring chutzpah and ambition of English actors. We are following an old cultural drove road.
In about 1600, the first theatre was constructed in Poland. A former fencing school in what is now Gdańsk (then Danzig), it was converted to host professional players from London. A rectangular courtyard space open to the elements, modelled on the Fortune Theatre in Clerkenwell, it proved popular with the locals, and audiences flocked in. The traditional practice was for these English companies to petition the local mayor, requesting permission to play. Copies of these petitions to the mayor of Gdańsk are extant and provide evidence of the touring tradition. They are fawning in tone but shot through with the deal-making toughness of men who know their own worth. There are moans about the rain at recent performances, negotiations over ticket pricing, and accounts of having to improvise venues at the last minute when the plague would not allow access to the fencing school (our Hamlet tour had to skirt West Africa for similar reasons).
In a classic bid to reassure the burgomasters, they plead: ‘Our entertainment will be so modest and polite that nobody will be offended by it; on the contrary, there will be all manner of instruction for everyday life to be gained.’ It sounds like an application to the Arts Council stressing educational value. Permits were often refused, with forbidding words about how taxes weren’t paid on the last visit, and sometimes granted, though accompanied with dire warnings about the fines that would follow excessive fly-posting. These petitions form a sweet testament to how little has changed over the intervening centuries: making and staging theatre is still an odd blend of flashy bombast, pragmatic horse-trading and naked begging.
Shakespeare and his colleagues’ approach to the international market was a large part of the London theatre scene in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare’s world was a genuinely European one, both in its ambitions for its work and in its audience at home. London was a city teeming with overseas visitors; Shakespeare himself boarded near the Blackfriars Theatre with a French family. Most of our knowledge of the layout of the Globe comes from a diary entry by a Swiss tourist, Thomas Platter, and a sketch of the Swan theatre by a Dutchman, Johannes de Witt. The Globe has always had a reciprocal relationship with the wider world, accepting audiences at home and travelling out to meet them.
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It used to be taken as read that the early modern acting companies upped sticks and left London to go on the road because of the plague. That, and the rage and contempt of the city fathers. There’s truth in both, but there is now ample evidence that touring carried on when the London theatres were open and healthy, and that companies ran an extensive touring programme alongside their building-based work.
Why tour? First, money. There was an audience of hungry citizens unable to come to London to be entertained. There were also wealthy parochial patrons eager to impress client networks and posh neighbours with shows they could sponsor and present. Money, and making it, is the most original practice of all. This is hard to credit in our day, full of shyly presented outreach programmes so stuffed with proof of virtue and condescending good works that mischief and fun (the motors of all good drama) hardly get a look in. Equally defeatist is our glum expectation that people deserve a medal for playing in ‘the provinces’, an expectation fuelled by a snobbish centralisation of artistic legitimacy. Within such contemporary contexts, it is impossible to get our heads around the confidence and desire with which these companies would travel. They didn’t arrive timidly in the hope that an audience might show up, promising workshops and Q&As as an inducement; they kicked the door down, saying, ‘We’re here! Come and get it. We’re going to shag some story into you.’
Touring was in these people’s blood. For several hundred years, British theatre was touring. The fun palaces built in London in the 1570s and 1580s were Johnny-come-lately edifices. For centuries, British theatre had improvised stage realities, conjuring up Christian ritual in the courtyard of an inn, ancient Rome on booth stages in market squares, and English history at one end of a Guild Hall. Theatres were made not from wood and brick and plaster, but from the collaborating imagination and willpower of actors and audiences.
Shakespeare’s own company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, were a touring company long before they found a home. They frequently visited Stratford upon Avon, granted permission to perform by Shakespeare’s father, John. The young Shakespeare would have been ushered to the front of the audience by his proud alderman father in Stratford’s Guild Hall. Something in one of those performances, some stray gesture of magical unlocking, maybe an actor looking deep into his eyes with their perennial promiscuous connection, could have ignited the desire to make theatre within the young William. No matter that they would have been intoning some thumping old lump of Tudor poetry, the boy would have been hooked. There is speculation that his first experience of making theatre was after hitching a ride with a touring company and thrilling to the freedom of life on the road.
This is another central fact about touring. It is a blast. It is the single reason why touring began, continued and still continues. Theatre has become so defensive as a business, having to protect itself from the depredations of pundits and critics, always looking to find virtuous and socio-political reasons to justify its own existence, that it forgets to mention the principal reason why people get involved in the first place. It is the best time that you can have without drugs. Touring sharpens the pleasures that life in the theatre naturally affords – the sense of fleeting connection, of families created that are intense and short-lived, and all the more intense for their shortness. It also distils the outlaw pleasure of trucking into a place, painting the landscape around you in new and surprising colours, gifting a story, some laughter and some new thought to a community, and then getting out fast before the ties of responsibility, or the heavy hand of the law, catch up with you.
When Shakespeare has Hamlet welcome ‘the tragedians of the city’ into the narrative of his own world, he is setting off chimes for the audience, and in self-reflexive fashion for the author. The play they perform is clonky. Though ‘The Murder of Gonzago/Mousetrap’ (with Hamlet’s additions) is terrible by comparison with the real play, the freedom with which the Players blow through the cold stone world of Elsinore offers a glimpse for Hamlet and for us of a better way of life. They are free to come into the world with noise and joy; free to make frustratingly real connections with their phoney feelings, while Hamlet cannot connect with his own real ones; free to cock a snook at the court in a play that says much that is unsayable; free to speak truth to power. And then, crucially, free to go.
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Back in Ystad, we were not exactly speaking truth to power, but we were honouring touring theatre traditions by getting very merry. A fierce show was followed by a hosted event at the theatre, turbo-charged by the audience’s excitement. ‘But I do not understand, it is just the play,’ a Swedish theatre-maker burbled at me, ‘it is just the play. It is so naked. It is so exciting. Just the play.’ We had a similar effect at our first international gig in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg playhouse, a grand old theatre which houses the great Ivo van Hove’s relentlessly experimental Toneelgroep company. You could sense the unease from the hyper-cultured audience as we began. Nursed and nurtured as they were on radical deconstructions and conceptual reworkings, the sheer nudity and bareness was a shock. For a while, you could s
ense their feeling that this was all a trick, and that at a certain point a huge amount of scenery would swoop in and make an elaborate point about war or gender or corruption in FIFA. Then you followed their growing realisation that this is what it is, and instead of worrying about having to have an attitude about something extraneous to the play itself, they were simply being asked to watch the play. You could almost sense a letting go of tension, a shoulder-dropping freedom as they realised that an attitude was not required, simply a head and a heart. Their relief was palpable, and in Amsterdam and in Ystad they rose in exhilaration at the end.
We repaired to our Spartan hotel, which we filled with Hellenistic delirium. It was early in the tour, and the company were all cautiously careful about each other’s boundaries. There were no such worries between the company and the theatre staff, and boundaries were merrily crashed through. The scream of ‘Jacuzzi!’ went up, and everyone crowded into the one room with a functioning Jacuzzi and then all dived in. I didn’t because I was tiring rapidly, and because younger actors have the most absurd bodies and comparisons are odious, so sloped off to pass out. The next morning offered the pleasure of watching extreme hangovers meeting a Nordic breakfast. Gherkins, pickles and coleslaws have a disorienting effect on delicate stomachs.
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It was a determination of mine from the moment I arrived on Bankside that we would revive the first Globe’s practice of going on the road. It was time for the Globe to spread the word beyond the polygonal enclosure of its own walls. We travelled first on a circuit around the United Kingdom, then reached out to Europe, then to the USA, and now, with Hamlet, were covering as much of the planet as we could.
Why did we risk the dignity of a loved institution with this new endeavour? First, we were filling a hole. Touring Shakespeare had been a continuous tradition since the plays were written. These plays were made for walking, not for sitting at home, but when we began our touring, the tradition was withering on the vine. Companies that had toured for decades had decided to dump that tradition and ditch their audiences, without leaving so much as a note on the kitchen table. The holes we were filling were not just cement municipal theatres that have to be filled with product; they were holes in the stomachs of people who had grown up with an appetite for the unique food Shakespeare provides.
Shakespeare wrote for the rough and simultaneously sophisticated instrument of the Globe, and towards the end of his life with an eye to the indoor theatres and the new storytelling and technological advantages they offered. But he also had a constant memory of the melodramatic pulse of the older forms of storytelling. The rough magic of touring companies was hard-wired into his understanding of theatre. He wanted to adapt and grow those energies, but he did not want to extinguish them. Shakespeare was never crudely dismissive of these forms. His affection for the hard-nosed pros who drift through Hamlet is palpable, as it is for the rude mechanicals in Dream, and for the absurdly pretentious presentation of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s. Nor, though an artist, was he as po-faced about being an artist as many of those who have reinterpreted him. He made his art out of mud and laughter.
There’s a fashion in theatre now for creative elements to dub themselves theatre-makers. ‘I’m not an interpreter of plays; I’m a theatre-maker,’ they tell you rather shrilly. Fundamentally, this seems to mean they tell other people what to do, while they furrow their brows earnestly behind fashionable spectacles and practise some happening hand movements. Give them something to actually make – to sew, to clip together, to lift, to light, to attach – and they will break down in tears. Our touring shows had to be mountable and demountable within a couple of hours. Some of my sweetest moments in my time at the Globe were helping in that process. Then, when our stage management told me to go away because I was not helping, there was a similar pleasure in watching the economy of effort, the dexterity of hand and the skill of mind with which they completed their task. On beaches, in piazzas, in grand auditoria, in scruffy ones, they made a theatre each time. The simplicity of that, the purity in process, the truth in endless motion, is what our touring aimed to preserve.
Touring kept us honest. Our small-scale tours were the antidote to the institutional self-importance which being static can encase. If you are putting out chairs in a mud-sludged field, if you are improvising tickets for an insta-box-office from a book of raffle tickets, if you are dismantling a set as the rain pours down, it is hard to take yourself too seriously. However much you might try. We come into the theatre for the simple pleasure of giving joy and sharpening insight and honouring truth. It is easy to get diverted from that. We went on the road not only to risk our dignity, but actually to lose it. If you can’t risk your dignity, you are lost as an artistic institution, and if you can’t happily give it away, then you’re lost as a theatre. There was something about doing this barebones, back-of-a-van, booth Shakespeare, at that moment and onwards, that served as a two-fingered salute to those who would build a moat around his work.
There is still a gatekeeper mentality in much of the Shakespeare world. Gestures, extravagant ones often, are made towards accessibility and openness and internationalism. When faced with the reality of that openness – a reality presented by the Globe with its twenty years of tickets at £5 catering to many millions – the high priests of the Shakespeare industry often run screaming back to their closed-shop conferences, burbling angrily about tourists and schoolchildren and the uneducated. Taking Shakespeare on the road was our best way of flying far from such exclusion. Taking Hamlet to the world was for us both a fact and a gesture: actually going to every country and metaphorically saying these plays were built for everyone.
The hares that Shakespeare set running 400 years ago still run, and, year on year, run further and wilder.
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Four hundred years after Gdańsk opened its first theatre in the old fencing school, an enterprising group of visionaries, led by an ebullient academic, Jerzy Limon, built a new theatre on the same site. It was an impressive and expensive endeavour, and we were accorded the honour of being the first company to play the theatre with our Hamlet. A spectacular edifice on the edge of a beautiful town, it lacked the festivity one associates with a theatre. Built entirely of a forbidding and sombre black brick, and entirely featureless on the outside, undisturbed by signs or colour, it looked more like a holocaust memorial than a palace of fun. The inside was brighter, filled with startlingly blond wood. A cursory inspection revealed that no actors had been involved with its creation. From the stage, it was impossible to see almost a third of the seats, let alone be seen by them. There was a retractable roof, like Wimbledon – a brilliant idea – though there seemed to be an embargo on opening the roof if there had been any trace of wind over the preceding four months.
There was an opening ceremony the day before the first performance, attended by the President, the Prime Minister and a clutch of other dignitaries from Poland and abroad. Jerzy, who is one of the most charming and sweetest men in Europe, had come up with the lovely idea of our company presenting a petition to the Mayor of Gdańsk, as the Comedians of England had done 400 years before. We confected a speech from many of the ones we still have, with a few contemporary additions. Everyone was excited before the ceremony began. It didn’t last.
The ceremony seemed to have been designed by committee, which was just about plausible, but appeared to be also executed by committee, which really wasn’t. Speech followed long speech, and the sound system failed on a regular basis, so the audience, a large proportion of whom were not able to see what was happening, were treated to prolonged muttering by dignitaries. Video was as troubled as audio, and flickered to life uncertainly. Prince Charles appeared on a screen, though sadly unaccompanied by sound, mouthing noiselessly his goodwill to the project. Various exotic acts appeared unsupported by much in the way of technology or knowledge of how the stage worked. Temporary relief was called when there was a bomb scare and everyone had to quit the theatre for an hour
or so.
However, return was inevitable, and we were all shepherded back in. Our company were preparing to go on and present their petition when they noticed the stage filling up with smoke. They were reassured this was an effect and told to carry on. The stage was soon so full of dry ice that they quickly became uncertain as to where the audience was, or, more alarmingly, the edge of the stage. One of them nearly fell off and had to be held by a colleague. The dry ice had now spread to engulf much of the audience. It was hard to know how to start, but, no matter, they groped around in the smoke to find each other, and once able to present a united front, started shouting out their petition into a primordial fog. The Mayor of Gdańsk, for a reason unexplained, was being played by an English actor, Julian Glover, rather than by the Mayor of Gdańsk, who would seem to have had a better claim on the role. No matter; Julian made his way out of the audience, not without some difficulty through the smoke, to accept our company’s petition.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 6