The reasons he gives for stopping are legalistically religious. How can he kill this man at prayer, since that will send his soul straight to Heaven? What revenge would that be for the death of his father, whose soul was taken from his body in a moment of hedonistic ease, napping after a big lunch (‘full of bread’) without being confessed or having his soul cleansed? These reasons are serious, and in their own time fundamental to the repose of the eternal soul. In a largely secular country and a largely secular age, their currency is diminished. Yet the image still arrests. The man about to kill and choosing to stop.
We supplied other reasons. In the production, we experimented with Claudius giving a small gasp of remorse just as Hamlet arrives, so Hamlet is paused by a sudden burst of conscience. We pushed Hamlet closer, so it is the proximity that stops him, an alarming sense of the actuality of another’s flesh. He smells the sweat coming off the King, he sees the vulnerability of the neck up close, and something animal stays his hand. This image is so strong and so securely layered into our cultural conscience because it is textured with so many ironies (the King who has killed and who wants to commune with Heaven and can’t, unknowingly kneeling in front of the Prince who cannot kill), but also because it asks such important questions. In part, why do we kill, but also, more tellingly, why do we not kill? Why stop? Why not kill them all?
* * *
‘Very flat Cambodia,’ someone drawled in a Noel Coward voice as we descended from the air into Phnom Penh airport. The view was featureless, an unending plain surrounding the broad Mekong River, a flat brown marked out with agricultural rectangles. Even from on high, the brown seemed flecked with red, and the earth exuded a dark charisma relating back to its recent history of violence. Whether that red was real or supplied by a Western narrative soaked into the consciousness of my generation was hard to tell, but at that moment the scarlet clay made it real enough.
The Mekong River threads together three countries: Laos where it rises, Cambodia which it passes through, and Vietnam where the broad delta opens out into the sea; three countries caught collectively forty-odd years ago in a prolonged moment of insane state violence, a convulsion as historically senseless as any in the deranged annals of state warfare. The Vietnam War had a collection of pretexts: the end of colonialism, a proxy war for influence between the West and China, a clash of ideologies, a local turf war, and a test of America’s superpower pride, but finally, as documented in many films and in much great writing, it just came down to grunts counting up their kills. The senselessness of this, a war without moral compass and simply encouraging soldiers to kill for the sake of killing, inflicted hideous damage on the landscape of Vietnam itself, spread destruction around it, and created a rottenness in the bones of all the participants wherever they hailed from. Vietnam suffered the brunt, but the hideous corollary suffered by its neighbouring countries was no side-show.
The Americans, as a precautionary measure, which took precautionary measures to a reductio ad absurdum all of their own, dropped as many munitions on neighbouring countries Cambodia and Laos as were dropped by all parties in the whole of the Second World War. The results were not only death on a horrifying scale, but also the destruction of social fabric and social cohesion, the sort of destruction which leaves the ground free for the worst to prosper in. Just as with Syria and Iraq, where shock and awe encountered social systems built slowly over decades and centuries and blew them to fragments. Whether healthy or unhealthy, these systems are better than nothing, since they provide checks and balances on the psychotic and the violent. Just as Bush and Blair’s ‘shock and awe’ created the waste-ground within which the pathologies of Islamic State could flourish, so Nixon and Kissinger’s brutal geopolitics created the soil to nurture the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. Social cohesion of whatever sort, gentle or toxic, takes generations to secure; bombs take several seconds to destroy it, and they leave little but chaos behind. Chaos, especially that created by violence, spawns monsters.
The Khmer Rouge rode into their capital Phnom Penh in 1975, shortly after the departure of Americans from the neighbouring capital Saigon. They drove in to the cheering of crowds lining the streets. Their leader Pol Pot and his cadre of colleagues had all studied in Paris and had become obsessed by the French Revolution. Something of the French predilection for purity and abstraction had driven slivers of mathematical coldness into their hearts. They resolved to go as far as they could with what they perceived to be the aims of Robespierre et al. Though with more thoroughness. Days after taking the capital city, the Khmer Rouge warned all the citizens to evacuate to the countryside, having spooked up a phoney American bombing raid. Once out in the country, they were never allowed back, as the political leadership attempted to turn the whole country into a nation of rice farmers. They declared this moment Year Zero, wiped history clean, and decided to start again and make a better world.
To make this easier, they attempted to eliminate anyone who might have other ideas. They went after not just the critics and the rebels, but anyone who could potentially become so. All the intellectuals, teachers and thinkers of any sort were wiped out. There is an urban myth that at one point they resolved to kill anyone wearing spectacles, since spectacles were clearly a sign of intelligence. Though since anyone continuing to wear spectacles after that diktat can’t have been that bright, it seems rather self-defeating. But it wasn’t only intellect they resolved to destroy, it was also art in all forms. Art became an enemy. They didn’t just try to cut off the head of the nation, they tried to destroy its capacity for imagination and for feeling. Of all of the scarring insanities of the twentieth century, Cambodia was one of the most chilling.
It was a horror show that only invasion could sort out, and the Vietnamese moved in to release the stranglehold which a fanatical government had over its own people. Though the Khmer Rouge were still leant political legitimacy by the recognition of the UN long after they had lost power, their international capital was worn down by the testimony of survivors, by the attention of investigative journalists, most notably John Pilger, and by a film, The Killing Fields.
Looking at the earth from the air, it wasn’t hard to mentally score the fields with the scars of that past. Nor is it something that the Cambodians discourage. The tourist dollar is never going to be declined, and whatever brings it in helps. I spotted a tuk-tuk, a rickshaw with exhaust fumes. It had a panel on its side with a list of tourist attractions and the prices to get there. The first list was ‘In the City’, and coming in at Number Three below the Royal Palace and the National Museum, the Genocide Museum. The second list was ‘Outside the City’, and right at the top was the Killing Fields. Something about the nakedness of this commodification of genocide disturbed.
The uneasiness led to dark humour as we travelled to our venue. We only had thirty hours in the country, and as usual there was a determination to see as much as possible while there. Hands went up to indicate who wanted to visit the Killing Fields the next morning. People started noisily to sort their itineraries – sleep, show, big dinner, sleep, genocide museum. No sooner was it said than the company realised the dark absurdity of including a scene of murder within an itinerary. They riffed darkly on the idea – a wilfully light-hearted response to a travelling conundrum. How does anyone properly pay respect to the suffering of others?
It was not the first time the problem had arisen. With the same dark humour, the company talked back across the places they had visited where they had been brought face to face with man’s capacity to inflict slaughter on man. Most recently, East Timor, where the Indonesians barged in in 1975 on a slim pretext and stayed for twenty-five years, decimating the population. There the company had visited the sight of the Santa Cruz massacre, the atrocity witnessed by Western media, the acknowledgement of which had begun the slow process of stopping people from looking the other way. In Rwanda, the company had to improvise an outdoor show when their indoor power failed, and gave a triumphant performance in a courtyard filled with thousa
nds, some climbing trees and walls to watch. It was received exuberantly, and, to the company’s surprise, death was met with the same giddiness as humour and love. An academic travelling with them, researching the responses of audiences, asked a woman to explain why. She spoke of what it was like to live in a country still plucking human bones out of the earth, where they had all lost so many so close, and how death held less fear for them. Death was death, nothing special. In Ethiopia, there was another genocide museum, in another country where the geometry of an idea was forcibly pushed onto the bumps and curves of a country. These are explicit incidences in a world which often seems to be created out of genocide, where mass slaughter is the tool used to indent large shapes into the rock face of history. And where those countries that hide it the best – the UK, America and Australia – are far from the least guilty.
Arriving at the venue, one of the first questions asked by a technician was, ‘Is this play about the Khmer Rouge?’ He was pointing at a poster showing Hamlet holding Yorrick’s skull. For many countries this image is an iconic reference to a play; here it is recent history. The Khmer Rouge created their own iconography of slaughter, scattering skulls across the land and piling them up in cairns which dotted the landscape. More practical concerns immediately distracted us as we negotiated how to survive one of the most eccentric venues we had encountered. It was a mammoth upturned bath, big enough to contain several thousand people, on a university campus, with a headmaster’s lecture space at one end. It was not a space to perform a human and complex play.
The actors dashed back to their hotel, while I gave a talk at the university. Eighty or ninety bright and shining student faces gleamed at me in high expectation. I outlined the history of the Globe, then threw open the room to questions. They asked insistently, in a variety of forms, ‘What can this play mean to us now?’, ‘What can it mean to Cambodia’s history?’. . . I tried to answer, sensitive to the fact that their history was their history, and it would have been presumptuous of me, a know-nothing from elsewhere, to talk to them about how to heal their own wounds. Yet the appetite for meaning and clarification was a powerful presence in the room. This was not Hamlet the literary problem; this was Hamlet in a place still swathed in darkness and seeking hungrily for light.
There was little illumination looking likely back at the venue. The show began to an audience of about 2,000, most students in for free. The room had the most infuriating acoustic, where if a member of the audience coughed it was abjectly deafening, but if the actors all stood at the front of the stage and screamed their heads off, no one could hear them. Blocking had to be re-assessed in such venues, and complex shapes flattened out into a line across the front of the stage; psychological nuance had to take a back seat to semaphoring hand movements, and textual music gave way to an Olympic shouting competition. Despite that, a sweltering pre-monsoon heat, and the atmospheric addition of bats which swooped through stage and auditorium, the actors wrestled the play and the space and the audience into a conversation. At the end, there was a hugely cheering reception, a roar of excited gratitude for giving the play.
Afterwards, we met some of Tommy’s friends, who were working with an organisation called Cambodian Living Arts. Cambodia had long been a generous provider of arts and culture, especially of the arts that live happily on the cusp of private expression and public presence – music and dance and song. The Khmer Rouge put a devastating full stop to that tradition. Among the two million who died were 90 per cent of Cambodia’s artists, singled out for execution. But some survived, amongst them a young Master Musician called Arn Chorn-Pond. In a children’s labour camp, he learnt to play the khim, a Cambodian variant of the dulcimer, and one of the reasons he survived was that he would play it for the Khmer Rouge generals during mass executions. He later returned home, resolved to try to revive from the ashes as much and as many of the cultural traditions as existed, with the help of the few Master artists who had also survived. Through recording wherever he could, through teaching, and through passing the knowledge on in any way possible, the traditions were slowly coming back to life. Cambodian Living Arts were carefully regrowing a whole ecosystem which had been wiped out. In their own words:
The arts play a defining role in the recovery and resilience of societies that have gone through the tragedy of war, genocide or armed conflict. Safeguarding the arts and the cultural values attached is fundamental to giving a sense of purpose, managing conflict-induced trauma and emancipating minds. In the current world situation of increasingly frequent and detrimental conflict, the arts have the power to build hope and foster self-determination.
Small hope from such fragmented but determined rebuildings. After the show, at a bright roadside cafe where we ate some delicious beef rumoured to be smeared with crack, some knobbly fried sweetcorn and a big bowl of curried frog, one of our promoters talked of her enchantment with the country, a little about the temples of Angkor Wat and their continuing capacity to amaze, but more about the landscape and its great annual conjuring trick. Once yearly, the rains come teeming down, and the clayey earth swiftly turns recklessly fecund, the reddish brown giving way to the most dazzling green, a dense and brilliant green as far as the eye can see.
* * *
Hamlet the play works on a double axis in relation to killing. One character, Hamlet, is spooled inexorably towards an act of murder, a thread reeled in ineluctably towards the strike of the act. Another character, Claudius, we watch unspooling away from his crime, his certainty and confidence unravelling as the play progresses. The moment in which Hamlet pauses before deciding not to kill Claudius is the moment, right in the golden section of the play, where the two axes intersect.
We cannot be certain that Claudius has done the deed for the first two acts of the play. We trust Hamlet, because he is the title character and because of the weight of words he hurls at us, but his overwrought imagination could be inventing villains everywhere. We have the report of the Ghost, but even in the play doubt is cast on its bona fides, since there is no certainty it is not a ‘goblin damned’ or some other such mischief-maker.
The first Claudius we meet is plausible, strong and cheerful. He is swift in the dispatch of government business, has an appealing common touch and seems tenderly considerate towards Hamlet. His words on the necessary deaths of fathers seem apposite. It seems hardly surprising that this confident and effective King would drive Hamlet to fury, since he is the antithesis of himself. Our suspicions are raised but not confirmed until Act 3 Scene 1. In lines which we eventually cut, he turns to us, after Polonius has spoken of how the face can dissemble what the heart feels, and in a swift and piercing aside says:
O! ’tis too true;
How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plastering art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word:
O heavy burden.
The moment after he has said this, finally speaking his own truth, Hamlet is on, saying, ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ Previously a shadow of suspicion had hung over this sunshine King, now he is occluded in darkness, and our knowledge of his crime colours his subsequent actions. Soon his edges are fraying. His relationship with Gertrude, confident and passionate at the beginning, grows fragile. His judgement, assured at the beginning, starts to look shaky. Carrying through Polonius’s idea of spying on Hamlet and Ophelia is a crass and paranoid move. The idea of the play never seems welcome to him, and he arrives a hesitant spectator. What unfolds before him, the depiction of the act of killing his brother first in dumbshow and second in crude verse, is the manifestation of the nightmare of everyone carrying a burden of sin. Its manifestation in public is every ruler’s nightmare. He leaps on to the stage, screaming, ‘Give me some light!’ The smooth politician of the first scene is now the autocrat babbling for relief from his bad dreams. We see him shortly after trying to jitter his way towards a solution with Ros
encrantz, Guildenstern and Polonius. Then he is left alone, we imagine in a small chapel, and we watch as he tries to confess his crime before us, and shrive his soul.
What follows is one of the most active soliloquies in Shakespeare. It is the compelling theatre of a man wrestling with his own conscience, a man attempting to cleanse his own soul, to expunge his own history. Thankfully, most of us know little or nothing of killing, though it haunts our worst nightmares, the ceaseless running and running from a crime, and we absorb it empathetically from imaginative acts like Dostoevsky’s recreation of the fevered self-torture of Raskolnikov. Seldom in literature has the sense of a human conscience tearing at its own enshrouding flesh been made more clammily real than here:
CLAUDIUS O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will:
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder’?
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder
My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen.
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.
‘Help, angels! Make assay!’ is not a gentle plea; it is a roar of need, the roar of someone who has lost their way, calling on any and every agency that might help to lend aid. It is at this moment that Hamlet appears unseen, and it is this Claudius, tormented by a sense of sin not abstract but clutching at him, pleading to a god that may or may not be actual, it is this figure that he cannot put to death. The young man trying to wrestle his sweet and pained imagination towards an act of killing, the older trying to wrestle his way away from it. Something about this symmetry makes it an artistic necessity that Hamlet does not kill, that the two people are static, stuck in confusion and unable to resolve themselves. One man reeling towards murder, the other away from it. Hamlet leaves the stage, and Claudius, unaware of the danger he has been in, looks to us and speaks nakedly of his failure to atone:
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