My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
For Claudius, for the murderer, nothing can atone and nothing can salve. From here on in, he becomes an increasingly desiccated figure, his hope and his humanity hollowed out by the weight of his sin. His paranoia and his desire to control become desperate, he threatens Hamlet physically to extort information from him, he sends him to England with secret instructions that he should be executed there, and he lies to Gertrude. This relationship, so sexually alive and powerful at the beginning, now seems sere and tedious. Claudius himself talks with a deadened flatness of the inevitable loss of love in any relationship:
I know love is begun by time,
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;
On Hamlet’s return, having faced down Laertes with the last vestiges of his old kingly authority, Claudius employs Laertes to help kill Hamlet with a plot that is improvised and squalid. His enthusiasm for it has all the grubby sniggering excitement of the small-time criminal. The commanding voice of the beginning is now the nervous paranoid snigger of the end. His plot falls apart as it is bound to, taking Gertrude, Laertes and himself with it. There is still a little life force left in him at the end, a belated scream for help just so he can keep going, akin to Saddam Hussein’s spat out ‘Fuck you!’ to his executioner just before he fell the length of the rope that snapped his neck. Having been stabbed with the poison-tipped sword, and been forced to drink his own poison, Claudius cries out, ‘O, yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt.’
This is a desolate end, the journey away from murder a comfortless path. The nausea in the soul of Claudius separates him from truth, from his closest loved one, from all others, and before long from his own self. Hamlet’s reluctance to kill is given extra cause by the parallel narrative of Claudius. The story of Claudius exemplifies the identity whirlwind that is unleashed by such a crime.
Murder is brought into the heart of the play. Hamlet’s initial reluctance to commit it being followed by mayhem on an almost deranged scale; Claudius’s act of fratricide leading to a search for repentance, which once it fails causes the destruction of his own moral sense. The taking of a life is shown to be a poison uniquely of itself, which poisons everything around it.
* * *
Pol Pot died on the run. He had been holed up near the Thai border for two decades holding onto a nominal power and watching his following winnow away through desertion or through his own acts of paranoid murder. His own military had turned on him, and just before he was handed over to the government, he died in his sleep, some say through suicide, some through murder, whichever way through poison. This was denied in the anti-eulogy of his captor, Ta Mok. ‘Pol Pot has died like a ripe papaya. No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he’s finished, he has no power, he has no rights, he is no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertiliser.’
Whether he suffered agonies of conscience is open to question. Whether all who have blood on their hands have the same passionate desire to rid themselves of blood’s taint as Shakespeare’s haunted murderers is again hard to imagine. The three people I have known who have taken human life seemed in one case to be properly haunted, in another to have made a sound accommodation, and in another not really to give much of a hoot. Depressingly I imagine the same spectrum is more generally applicable. Some struggle towards the taking of life, some just do it, some suffer the agonies of the damned afterwards, some sleep soundly. In that sense, Hamlet is set in an idealised context – it is not the savage landscape of Macbeth’s Scotland or Lear’s Dark Ages England, where life is comparatively cheap – this is a world where life has value, and the taking of it matters.
* * *
The morning after the show, incidents crowded in to bring these questions into sharp relief. I was sitting in the courtyard of our hotel, at a raised table made from a slab of marble, drinking sludgy and sharp coffee to sting me into life. I started receiving messages on my tablet. One was from Keith. He has an old friend who, as Keith travelled the world, was undertaking a parallel tour de force – drawing a cartoon for each country. His one for Cambodia was sharp and fierce. It showed a diminished Hamlet standing behind a river of skulls, crying feebly and faintly ‘Yorrick, Yorrick, Yorrick’ into the air above them. A mordant caption said ‘The show went all right’ above them. Another message was from a Globe colleague who was marking my final year in the job by sending me a quote every day. This one was from King John:
There is no sure foundation set on blood,
No certain life achieved by others’ death.
Another message, a tweet to the company from a member of the audience, said briefly and pertinently all that we could want to hear from a citizen of a country which was slowly rebuilding a theatre tradition: ‘I laughed. I felt pain. I lived. My first play and I could not have asked for more.’
Shortly after these three messages intersected, our two Hamlets, Ladi and Naeem, together with Matt, returned from their trip to the Killing Fields. They had the awkward and touching air of people who did not know how to arrange a face; the baffled look of children at a funeral who want to ask their parents how to behave. And who, in the instant before they ask the question, perceive suddenly, with a perfect lostness, that their parents are in deeper trouble than they themselves. I have worn the same face myself many times, and have seen it in those I love. It always pierces. A place where compassion lives but does not yet know a language, it is the confused place where morality begins. Matt described what they had seen: the scattered bones, the piled-up skulls, the tree against which babies and infants were hammered to breaking, the speakers which played cheerful Asian folk music as the torture continued. He spoke as if it was faraway, with that self-protective distance which stops people from crumpling.
I had been reading on evolutionary history on the way out, a book which oscillated sharply between providing comfort and provoking fear. On the comfort side, it posited that one of the primary reasons for our evolutionary progress was the fragility of our babies. Large brains led to us standing up and getting bipedal; being bipedal meant narrow hips on our mothers; narrow hips and large brains meant babies born early and fragile. Much of our social organisation was built from the necessity to build protective conclaves around vulnerable babies. On the fear side, there was our capacity for slaughter, acts of mass killing which required the same social organisation as protecting an infant. Slaughter of horses and other animals corralled as herds into enclaves where they could be hacked into food; slaughter of other members of the species homo, neanderthals foremost and most savagely, to clear the way for our own triumphant and bloodstained uniqueness. Finally, slaughter of our own family, homo sapiens, for what we don’t know. Territory? Pleasure? Habit? Maybe both are true, and that is who we are, lost between a tender care for babies and a rapacious capacity for slaughter; an ingrained respect for life, especially that of the most vulnerable, set against a pathological and senseless capacity for destruction. Hamlet offers no answers, of course; that was never Shakespeare’s path – art resists geometry as automatically as a country does – and Hamlet and Claudius are in no way exemplary. But maybe in the absence of solutions, Shakespeare, living happily as ever in the middle of an insoluble crux, simply asks us to respect the struggle to understand, and the struggle to improve. The struggle is all. The play lives uneasily on its own question, ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ Maybe asking the question persistently is the best we can ask of ourselves.
We bussed up for the journey out to the airport, where we would part: myself for London and home, the company going on to Laos and Vietnam, and more of the same richness of experience. The Phnom Penh we drove through was busting with life, markets flinging forth colour, roads packed with weaving movement, cafes cramme
d with men sitting on deckchairs watching football on one telly and soft porn on another, pavements thick with encounter and bustle. Whatever was done to this country – and for a small country more horrendous damage was done to it proportionately than to almost any other – whatever was done, life had surged back with all its irresistible bright comedy.
For that irrepressible stir back to life we must be grateful: grateful for the return of music and dance to a country that almost lost it; grateful that Hamlet pauses in that instant before killing Claudius; grateful even for the conscience of Claudius; and for the confused, compass-resetting look on the boys’ faces after their trip to the Killing Fields; grateful for the ultimate meaninglessness of man’s killing and cruelty in the face of our capacity to refresh and renew; and above all grateful for the deep and dazzling green which bursts recklessly forth when the rains come.
87 South Africa, Johannesburg
The Market Theatre
27–29 March 2015
88 Lesotho, Maseru
National University of Lesotho
1 April
89 Swaziland, Manzini
House on Fire
3 April
90 Mozambique, Maputo
Teatro Avenida
5 April
91 Malawi, Blantyre
St Andrews International School
8 April
92 Zimbabwe, Harare
7 Arts Theatre
10 April
93 Zambia, Livingstone
Capitol Theatre
12 April
94 Botswana, Kasane
Seboba Cultural Centre
15 April
95 Namibia, Windhoek
National Theatre of Namibia
17 April
96 Spain, Madrid
Teatros del Canal
21–24 April
9
SOLILOQUIES IN THE ANDES
HAMLET Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Act 2, Scene 2
QUITO, ECUADOR, A CITY ON a high plateau floating between two volcanoes, where the high altitude renders everything DayGlo sharp. In the middle of the city, there is a park dominated by outsized acacia, cedar and eucalyptus, with grass so luminescently green it looks freshly spray-painted. Small crowds of two or three hundred, all indigenous (not a mestizo in sight), gathered in spaces between the trees and formed themselves into large ovals with a clear space in the middle. As I crossed the park, I heard ripples of laughter and light spreading from these groups. I approached and nudged my way through the wall of bodies, two or three people thick, to see what was in the centre.
All the attention, the lit-up faces and the sharpened ears, were intent on one man moving through the open space in the middle. He talked in a relaxed and honest way to the surrounding circle as he shambled his way around, casual though intent with meaning. Then, in an instant, his body would tweak with tension into a new shape, his voice shift a couple of octaves, and he would suddenly be in character. No hats, no props, no costumes, just the inventive mechanics of the body and the voice. The effect on the audience was immediate – gurgles of pleasure, delighting both in his transformation and in their shared recognition. It was theatre at its most fundamental: a single person telling a story on a patch of grass between two trees, under a mountain. I did not understand a syllable, and it was spellbinding.
There were frequent ricochets of laughter, picked up and redoubled by the encircling audience in the light we all shared. Laughing in the dark is one thing, laughing under the influence of both the material and the snorting and raucous faces around you is another. This reminded me of the Globe and its mutuality of pleasure. It was not just laughter: the storyteller could dip a story from farce to satire, from satire to pathos with an arch of an eyebrow or a drop of a shoulder. There was political bite too – anger tore through the storyteller’s voice and passed like a pulse through the watching circle. The immediacy of the response implied a newspaper freshness in the material. But as soon as solemnity had settled, it was ruptured, and the performer tore off on a flight of fancy, or into some fastidiously pompous comic creation. Every ten minutes – just to underscore the Elizabethanness of the whole experience – the performer was joined by a large woman, under a spreading hat, carrying a tray and drowning out his performance with cries of ‘Mango! 7Up! Get your fine 7Ups here!’
It wasn’t just the drink-seller who created a connection back to the Elizabethan theatre. The immediacy of contact, the direct relation between performer and audience seen here, was at the heart of what made the first Hamlet so compelling, and so radical in its initial performance. Never before had anyone opened up their interior space with such vividness and immediacy. Before Hamlet starts his second great soliloquy, ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’, he turns to the audience and says, ‘Now I am alone.’ It is a cutely placed metatheatrical joke. There are 3,000 people watching him. But by this stage they are alone together; the ‘I’ is inclusive and collective. All are travelling as ship Hamlet together, sailing uncertain seas.
A see-saw paradox lives at the heart of the play, a delightful inside-outside riddle which can never be resolved. The play is the most intimate exploration of a concealed soul ever undertaken, and that private exploration is achieved by nakedly public declaration. Inwardness and outwardness explode and implode together. The mode of achieving this is the soliloquy, and Hamlet demonstrates Shakespeare’s mastery of it.
A method of public privacy he perfected throughout his writing, the first signs of the range of this instrument may have occurred to him when he wrote Richard III’s thoughts on the night before the Battle of Bosworth. For most of his own play, Richard is the master of buttonholing the audience, taking them into his confidence and charming them with an assured comic entitlement. With a silky wit, a light irony and a boyish earnestness, he makes his appalling crimes appear innocent and natural. ‘What else could I do?’ is the dominant tone. Then, on the night before the climactic battle, awaking from a dream filled with the ghosts of his enemies, Richard’s confidence evaporates. The charm and sociopathic relaxation is replaced by the broken mumblings of the fully fledged paranoid:
Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!
Have mercy, Jesu! – Soft, I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly!
The switchbacks here, the turns, the self-contradictions and the zigzags are electrifying. It is the sound of a man breaking apart, and in the process, as he watches himself fragment, discovering capacities he did not know existed. A self-awareness perceived with the revelatory force of a man who confronts a mirror for the first time. It is the man of action discovering what consciousness is – and how doubt and confusion float behind consciousness like a vapour trail. The excitement of Shakespeare is palpable. He is discovering how gaps and silences in speech can fill up with electric charge, and how thinking aloud does not have to be a steady tread forward of consequent meaning, that it can be acrobatic and chaotic. The impression he felt in writing it would have been reinforced when he saw its effect on an audience and registered the dazzling thrill of its truth.
From Richard on, Shakespeare immersed himself in a variety of voices: Benedick is light and ludic, young Hal nervily assured, Falstaff revels in absurdity and paradox, Rosalind furiously tries to work out truths, Juliet scintillates and tests language against the turbo-charge of her soul. They all come to the edge of the stage and talk to us with their own honesty. But it is as if Shakespeare kept that particular tone, of troubled consciousness, of the wrestle between authenticity and confusion, in his back pocket, letting it grow there. He gives it a brief run out wit
h Brutus in Julius Caesar, another mind troubled by the question of whether to act or not, to kill or not:
It must be by his death: and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown’d:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;
And that craves wary walking. Crown him? – that; –
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him,
That at his will he may do danger with.
So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent. . .
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
The collapse of the syntax and the eruptive nature of the punctuation – ‘Crown him? – that;’ – introduces us to a mind disturbed, and one not in control of its own powers of articulation. This is speech, not a speech. We listen to the reasoning and the self-persuading, and share in the decision-making. For the audience, the thrill in being invited into the moment when an act of history was decided upon, to be not only in the conspirators’ tent, but in the mind of its leader, gives a sense of impertinent privilege. We are within Brutus’s phantasma; we preside in the council of mortal instruments. The theatre, a community of individuals living and breathing together on a point of thought, becomes a little kingdom, deciding which way to shift.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 15