Mexico is Mexico.
49 Poland, Gdańsk
Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre
20–22 September 2014
50 Kazakhstan, Astana
Shabyt Palace of Arts
27–28 September
51 Guyana, Georgetown
National Cultural Centre
24 October
52 Trinidad and Tobago, San Fernando
Sundar Popo Theatre, Southern Academy of Performing Arts
26 October
53 Suriname, Paramaribo
Theatre Thalia
29 October
54 Panama, Panama City
Teatro Nacional de Panamá
31 October
6
POLONIUS BY THE RED SEA
POLONIUS Thus sir, do we that know the world, being men of reach
By indirections find directions forth. . .
Act 2, Scene 1
‘’ULLO, I AM ZE BREETISH Consul.’
My startled reaction revealed my prejudice. I didn’t cover it well.
‘You can’t be. You’re French!’
‘Eet is a long stohry. Shall we ’ave a drink?’
We sat down. One by one the other members of the company came to join us, dressed in their evening casual best, and sat in a broad circle around this elegant, ageless man. Imported palm trees towered above us, and the heat of the day declined as a soft breeze blew in from the Red Sea. The consul spoke with a measured, steady calm, telling his own story, but also that of the statelet we were in, Djibouti. His tale was full of information, but for every five facts revealed, something in his delivery implied there were another fifteen concealed. He revealed a little about Britain here, something of France there, some US history at one moment, some projections of Chinese influence in the next. Every time he did so, he seemed to open a door on a wealth of hidden knowledge, allowing a glimpse of a glistening horde of secrets, before deftly closing the door again, leaving us hungry for more. Demure, discreet but indiscreet, gently witty, old-school charming, his performance had a mesmeric quality.
Djibouti sits in a geopolitical cat’s cradle all of its own. Right on the tip of the Horn of Africa, at the point where the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean meet, it is a place where world powers queasily coexist. With Yemen twenty-five miles distant across the Red Sea, Eritrea above, Ethiopia behind, Somalia below, this old French colony, not much bigger than the port at its tip, still retains a French military base, is home to the only US military base on African soil, and is the apple of China’s eye as a port of entry to Africa. The inbound flight was full of American Navy Seals with scarily thick necks, bristling with the tension of those who know they are in the wrong place. What we had seen of the country spoke of power and little else. Blasted dune landscapes were punctuated by cranes and gargantuan concrete warehouses. Long expanses of flat dust elided invisibly into flat sheltered sea, so the supertankers looked as if they were moving through the desert. Flat dull dry dusty power, with little of the human evident.
The twelve-star hotel we were staying in, a gilded cage of luxury in a part of the world starved of it, was crawling with refugees from a Graham Greene novel. Financiers at the shadier end of the spectrum, arms dealers and diplomats floated through an environment where even the outdoors seemed air-conditioned. Most of them shared the pasty overweight ugliness of the over-rich and the under-earned. There was no shortage of Special Forces either. Really bad Special Forces. Not your discreet, blend-in-with-the-crowd, darkness-in-the-back-of-the-eye Special Forces. These were the macho, body-building, look-at-us-we’re-Special-Forces type. They stood in the three infinity pools, crammed into eye-wateringly tight swimming trunks, staring at each other with their mouths open and occasionally flexing a pec. They seemed to like standing in threes, little triangles of nowhere-to-go masculinity. One of them I spotted absent-mindedly squeezing his own cock, which seemed telling. Fundamentally, every country with a substantial merchant navy parks these soldiers in this hotel in Djibouti, and then deploys them whenever a large ship passes down the strait as protection from Somalian pirates.
At the centre of all these competing interests, local, national and international, seemed to be our host. As the waves plashed gently on the artificially constructed beach, the view broken by more imported palm trees, we sat on wicker chairs on manicured phoney grass and listened to a deft and elegant lecture on the movement of power in the modern world. He threw up an exquisite cobweb, built from hints and allusions, subtle implications and wise inferences, which seemed to trap some of the mysteries of the world within its fine and glittering mesh. He was the lawyer for the hotel, for most of the government and, as his monologues spanned ever greater and finer filigree webs of influence, seemingly for most of the important people in the world. He began his career from Paris representing Djiboutian rebels fighting for independence, when their principal freedom fighters were all incarcerated. When they won, he became, at a very young age, their de facto legal representative. As is true everywhere, last year’s terrorist is often this year’s president. So our host flipped at speed from being the radical representative of the beleaguered to being the legal advisor to the government. Partially resident in Djibouti for more than thirty years, over the intervening time his influence and his connections had spread wider and wider.
Now everyone wanted access to this tiny lump of earth parked critically at a geopolitical crossroads. The approach of each was different. The European Union had spent a couple of decades trying to revive a heritage colonial project, rebuilding one of the first African railways from Djibouti to Addis Ababa. Long years and about 30 million euros were spent doing feasibility studies, environmental-impact assessments and legacy papers. After all that extraneous care, they secured no local consent, interested no one in it, and nothing happened. Then the Chinese turned up and announced that they were going to build a railway right across the girdle of Africa, from Djibouti to Nigeria, that they were going to do it in two years and bugger the consequences. Everybody signed up, and it seemed to be going ahead.
It is curious how the blunt can-do attitude of the old colonial powers is still so effective in the modern world, and how incapable of summoning up that spirit the old colonial powers are. I was reminded of an old Peter O’Toole legend. A friend shared a flat with both him and a painter in Earl’s Court in their youth. The friend overheard the painter bringing a nurse home, and then his hours of futile attempts to seduce said nurse in his bedroom. He begged, pleaded, cajoled, commanded, wept – all to no avail. He tried jokes, songs, sad stories, heroic ones, long enigmatic silences. Eventually, he gave up and retired to the sofa in the sitting room. An hour later, my friend heard O’Toole shinning up the drainpipe, the front door of their digs being locked. The only access came through a window in the painter’s bedroom. O’Toole was overheard clambering in. He spotted the nurse, and full of high spirits exclaimed, ‘Good-oh! Fancy a fuck?’ He received an exuberant ‘Yes, please’ by way of reply, and the rest of the night was filled with the noises of their happy love-making and cries of anguish from the painter on the sofa. Nothing beats confidence.
So there were the Chinese wanting access to East and Central Africa and the world, the Americans wanting to keep a security handle on where the oil was, and the Europeans trying to prove that they still deserved a place at the table. Beyond that there was every country which had parked a small military presence here to deal with the piracy problem, and was now wondering how else they could muddy the waters. Lurking in the background was everyone’s paranoid concern about what the Russians might be up to. The morning we arrived, the Turkish President had left our hotel, so maybe the Ottoman Empire still had life left in it. A hundred years ago, the British would have claimed an important presence. Now all they had was a French Honorary Consul, and our Hamlet. The strait we were looking out on, twenty-five miles of water between us and Yemen, bears the Arabic name Bab-el-Mandeb, in French ‘Porte des lamentations’, and in English ‘the gate of tears’.
One of the earliest points of human migration, now four million barrels of oil move through it every day. Too much history, too much shifting influence, too much delicate diplomacy hovering over too much brutal weaponry for the mind to cope with. Or for this country to contain without some offering up of lamentations, and some spilling of tears.
At the centre of this matrix, or pretending to be, was our host, the Talleyrand of East Africa. Geography, history, politics, power and art – all seemed assumed within him. The French have an exquisite ability to assert, wherever they happen to be, a height of understanding and a depth of insight well above the mortal. All while keeping their trousers immaculately creased. The dapper and unruffled French citoyen, offering up a knowledgeable context and a disapproving raised nostril to whatever mess the world provides, is one of the enduring historical cockroaches, surviving and elegantly. Say what you like about the French, they know how to dance lightly. I have always been a sucker for this, floating away from encounters with the powerful thrilled by the sensation that I am now closer to the mystery of things. It is a large part of the daft mystique of government – boxes, dossiers, attaché cases, all supposedly enclosing the priestly knowledge which brings the chosen closer to the god of power. When each box probably contains no more than an apple and some aspirin.
Our host was a master of these arts, and he carried off an immaculate couple of hours. The only false note came towards the end. Having consistently told us how tired he was, having been a key player in the recent visit of the Turkish President, and how little time he had to help organise our performance, when I said that unfortunately we had to adjourn for dinner, he rather heavily hinted he would like to join us. Since we had company business to discuss, I didn’t pick up on his need, but it didn’t fit his master-of-the-universe poise. Need and poise aren’t natural bedfellows.
* * *
Polonius, the father to Laertes and Ophelia, and chief fixer for Claudius, is as open to interpretation as any other part of this wilfully unmoored play. There are grounds for believing he was based on Cecil, the all-powerful adviser to Elizabeth I, who, together with his surrogate Walsingham, ran an extensive and frequently lethal intelligence service of his own. Cecil invented, or perfected, many of the stylings of intelligence work still used today – double-agents, triple-agents and agents provocateurs. When Polonius sends his servant Reynaldo to spy on his son, Laertes, in Paris, he tutors him in a cunning game of partial dishonesty to uncover more dangerous truths. He climaxes his seminar on snooping by stating the virtues of obliquity: ‘By indirections find directions forth. . .’ It is the mantra of diplomats, spymasters and power-brokers through the millennia.
In recent years, I have seen Polonius played as the brutal chief of a Stasi-like intelligence service; as an enquiring mind asking R.D. Laing-type questions in the search for psychological truth; as a clubbable British duffer whose wits are slowly slipping; and a whole rainbow of other colours. By and large, in our production we were playing him as a man over-promoted by a new ruler, so dizzy with his new influence and access to power that he fatally over-reaches himself.
However you play him, the chief delight for actor and for audience is the cadence of his voice. It is delicious, ripe and stuffed with excessive phrasing, full of the self-reference of the over-busy brain. Even within its lateral shifts and sudden switchbacks, it retains a stubborn musicality. When he discovers what he believes to be the reason for Hamlet’s madness – his heartbreak over the loss of Ophelia’s love – Polonius spontaneously combusts with self-delight. His pleasure is that he has solved a secret, that he is at the epicentre of the mystery. With the King and Queen, when he reports his discovery, his nervousness sends his syntax into a whirlpool from which it appears he may never escape:
POLONIUS My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.
GERTRUDE More matter, with less art.
POLONIUS Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he is mad, ’tis true: ’tis true ’tis pity;
And pity ’tis ’tis true: a foolish figure;
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him, then: and now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause:
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.
Perpend!
‘Perpend!’ is the despairing self-slap of the man trying to escape from the entrapping concentric rings of his own rhetoric. The circularity is maddening, not least to Gertrude, who upbraids him, but also delicious. Wherever we were in the world, audiences laughed with pleasure at this moment. Comically speaking, it was a banker moment. There was international recognition of the overly entitled windbag, of course, but the laughter was not cruel. There was huge affection, but also – delightfully – pleasure in the music of the language. Whether the audience spoke Mandarin, Swahili or Maori, the internal rhymes, the dancing fleet monosyllables, the self-contradiction – it translated.
After he has told the King and Queen he believes Hamlet’s love for Ophelia is the principal cause of his madness, he can’t resist drawing things out:
And he, repulsed – a short tale to make –
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
Into the madness wherein now he raves,
And all we mourn for.
The pursuit of precision here, when describing something as ineffable as mental decline, is its own lovely joke. We can feel Polonius’s approximation of the same confusion within his attempt to describe it. This is Polonius’s music with a turbo-charge of adrenalin beneath it, but earlier we hear the same music at ease with itself. He advises his son Laertes shortly before he sets off to Paris and a long separation:
Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There – my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!
There are a host of contradictions in this passage. Much of the advice militates against itself; much of it seems so finely calibrated as to be an instruction in etiquette rather than morality; some of it seems to emanate from the
style section of the papers, and after all of this instruction about how to be someone else in the father’s image, it seems a mite contradictory to finish with ‘to thine own self be true’. But there is good solid sense marbling through it as well, and who, in the painful moment of saying farewell to a child, when trying to flail some sense into the emotional winds around them, who hasn’t sounded a bit stupid? The relations within the Polonius family are often played as poisoned, which leaves Ophelia and Laertes nowhere to go at the end of the play, so it is important there is an appropriate weight of feeling in these moments. Whatever the surrounds, what better, or better expressed, thing is there to say to anyone than ‘to thine own self be true’?
Behind the contradictions, there is the confident balanced music of the man who can entrance a room, whether full of politicians or family members. When Shakespeare wants to write a nervous music, a confusion, a lack of articulacy, he does. People often mistake the fact that everyone speaks in verse for a belief that they are all equally articulate. This is far from true. Blank verse is an inimitable conduit for thought in the English language. This means that thoughts can be jagged, drawn out, awkward or confused. Hamlet’s first soliloquy ‘Solid flesh’ is rigorously iambic, while conveying the fragmented jumble of a crumbling mind. When Shakespeare wants to write a confident music, he does, and nowhere more elegantly than for Polonius. The seductive beauty of cadence whether read on the page or heard in speech is largely forgotten. To an English ear in Shakespeare’s time, cadence, whether heard in the luminous phrasing of a Lancelot Andrewes in the pulpit, or in the arguments of the law courts of a highly litigious age, or in the sack-soaked fruitcake wit of the tavern, for that ear cadence was one of the great pleasures of life. As with many of the verbal pleasures of Renaissance London, the delight in cadence could trace much of its ancestry back to Rome, and to Polonius’s spiritual ancestor, Cicero.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 10