This pure adventure, the radical thrill of new thought, can be done nowhere better than in this sort of arena, a shared light where audience and actor work together to push the possibilities of an evening or an afternoon in the sun. The proscenium arch and the black box are places for control, for teaching, not as much for journeying together. The communion where new thought is birthed in the instant it is said can only be achieved where a whole congregation comes together to make it happen.
Our connection with Hamlet persists throughout the scenes where he does not address us directly. We are complicit in his feelings about other characters; we hear his ironies and his subtexts. He flicks an occasional quick private thought our way. It is all food to maintain the friendship we have forged, though we miss the intensity of the connection we feel when he speaks directly to us. We mourn that absurd sense that we are privileged listeners, when only another thousand or so people are tuning in to the same. Then as the play burrows down its tunnel leading to disaster, we note that we are hearing from him less and less, and that he is drifting away. He stages his play; he shares with us his quandary over whether to kill Claudius or not; he scorches the ground from underneath his mother in a scene of such uncomfortable intensity that we feel we have seen too much; he kills Polonius by accident, then quips brilliantly with the King in a dizzying display of deflection and distraction. These scenes of quasi-hysteria, when Hamlet slips in and out of a madness which is part feigned, part genuine, place him almost too far away, beyond our reach. The boy/man we felt so close to and protective of has now gone to a place we can only observe. It is hard to empathise; it is not even easy to locate him.
He is exiled to England. On his way there, he chances to see Fortinbras, a figure who serves as a distracting mirror image, passing through Denmark on his way to attack Poland with a mighty Norwegian army. He turns to us:
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
There are a thousand different ways of reading this speech, each reflecting in some way the reader back at him or herself. It fills me with sadness and a sense of loss at the parting of the ways. The opening thoughts we know and are accustomed to – the worries over authenticity, the disabling effects of consciousness – but Hamlet has by this stage killed someone – Polonius – even if by accident, and we feel a tidal sense that he is approaching the moment when he will be able to act, and have to. The doubts, the thoughts, the confusion are drifting away like low-hanging morning mist burnt away by the sun. The decision and the action which will follow will extract from Hamlet most of what we cherish in him. I love him for his openness, his cowardice, his honesty, his trembling in the face of life. I don’t want him to be a man of action, or have bloody thoughts. This is our final moment alone with Hamlet, and something within it feels like a separation.
After his return from his aborted journey to England, there are no more soliloquies. We imagine he is talking to us when he speaks of Yorrick, and of the impermanence of Caesar and Alexander, and of his love for Ophelia. When he embraces a transcendent calm contemplating the fall of a sparrow, we hope that an element of it is a gift for us. When he closes the lid on his own story with ‘The rest is silence’, we in part imagine it is him finding closure on our behalf. But, in truth, he has drifted away. The man who returns from the sea has a sense of containment around him, and a free-floating independence within. He doesn’t have to unburden himself to us any more. Our intimate friend has grown up and grown away. In our production, as the court appeared for the fight with Laertes, Hamlet looked impassively around the audience. It was a farewell in a minor key.
* * *
The many poets who became Homer carried a mountain of words in their memory banks, locked within musical rhythms and formulaic phrases, and sang their tales of Achilles and Hector and Odysseus to silenced rooms of auditors, happy to sit for hours and hear of an epic past. In the Jemaa el-Fnaa, the great market circus in Marrakesh, hooded figures walk up and down chanting Arabian tales to the rhythm of their own footfall. Crowds of four or five hundred sit and stand enraptured by these stories from long ago, delivered in a chanting monotone which makes them come alive afresh. In Quito, on the bright-green grass, storytellers riff on politics and love, new washing machines and old heartaches, and the faces around them shine. All stories told to people in a circle, all sharing the same light, the lit humanity in their faces magnifying the humanity of each tale exponentially. All told with an open palm, as Alan Garner says is a necessity of storytelling, and never with a pointing finger. Hamlet stood out in front of a group of people in a circle and, with the same presence and the same honesty, told an entirely new story, a story of dread and fear and doubt, and of the birthing of a new consciousness. A story forged in the alchemy that binds together a voice and a listener.
In Quito, the performer finished with a lovely bathetic coda, as if the story he had told in all its vividness was melting back into the world. He bowed with a puppyish exuberance, as the crowd went briefly wild, then the 7Up seller stepped rudely in front of him. He wandered off across the park alone. So every story comes to an end, and the peculiar intimacy between teller and hearer, that momentary bond which trumps almost all others, has to dissolve. We have to leave, teller and hearer, in our different directions. As Armado says in Love’s Labour’s Lost, with the greatest last line in any play, ‘You that way: we this way.’ The actors to the mysteries of backstage, the audience to the different stories of the world.
97 Sri Lanka, Colombo
The British School
14 May 2015
98 Maldives, Malé
Olympus Theatre
17 May
99 Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur
Epsom College
19 May
100 Thailand, Bangkok
Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts
21 May
101 Indonesia, Denpasar
Ksirarnawa Taman Budaya Art Centre
24 May
102 East Timor, Dili
Hotel Timor
26 May
103 Australia, Geelong
Geelong Performing Arts Centre
28–29 May
104 New Zealand, Wellington
Wellington Opera House
New Zealand, Auckland
SKYCITY Theatre
1–2 June
3–5 June
10
NEWS FROM ENGLAND
HAMLET For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes. . .
Act 3, Scene 1
SOMETIMES YOU GET THE FEELING you should adjourn a day halfway through. Too many things are crashing and colliding into eac
h other. Mistake is bundling into mistake in a compressed time period, the compression compounding mistake into potential catastrophe. One of the first things to be at risk at such a moment is your own judgement. Sometimes you feel the wise move would be to go back to bed and hide under the duvet until all the demons of petty disaster have ghosted their way through your immediate environment.
Having rushed from rehearsals to jump into a BBC car to do a radio interview, we realised there was no BBC car there. We booked another non-BBC car, and it was running late. I got into it, but the driver didn’t know the way over the river let alone to the BBC. On the way to the BBC, our press department rang to ask me to do another radio broadcast later that night, this one a discussion on Free Thinking. Fine, I said, if each knows about the other and are happy with it. The wrong car, the late car and now the misdirected car was stuck in traffic, and arriving late looked odds-on. A text arrived to say the venue had changed, and we now had to go to Broadcasting House. I rang the producer’s number I had been given, but it was (of course) wrong, and I found myself talking to someone on Naturewatch. Things weren’t looking good.
It was the day before Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April 2015, and we were one year into our tour. The next day, we would open our summer season at the Globe, and the day after that we were flying out to Madrid, where the Hamlet company was completing a residency of four performances, to celebrate the one-year, halfway milestone. The birthday had woken the BBC up to the continuing relevance of Shakespeare, and it seemed I was the guest du jour – if I could make it to the studio. Eventually, stranded in traffic, I jumped out of the car and rushed through streams of people going the other way (why do more people always seem to be leaving the BBC than arriving?), and presented myself, scruffy, sweaty and breathless, to a nervous-looking producer, who scooted me up to the studio.
The first interview of the evening, for an amiable arts magazine programme on Radio 4 called Front Row, was going well enough, until the North Korea question heaved itself elephantinely into the room. It was now becoming habitual. ‘So, you’re going to North Korea?’ people asked, and whatever explanations or contexts you offered, you could not penetrate their caul of moral superiority. This was irritating on two counts. First, it asserted that they alone had spotted what was going on in the most written-about country on earth. The assumption being that we had missed it. The second, it was a classic example of Instant Whip Opinion, providing a brief, sweet-tasting moral superiority for anyone who wanted to find some fault in a corner, and thus felt permitted to ignore the stink in the rest of a large room.
Traffic, missed taxis and wrong numbers were less than great ways of smoothing out an occasionally volatile temper, but I managed to stay temperate. I put our case that the world was bigger than just North Korea, and that it was maybe useful to place North Korea in the context of what we had done in Africa, in Somaliland, in Sudan, in Central America, in Sarajevo, in Kiev, in ninety-seven other countries by that stage. And that, dare it be said, people in North Korea were actually people, and that they might deserve Hamlet as much as anyone. My interviewer gave me that look of smug scepticism which journalists specialise in, that shared delusion that their vicarious fascination with disaster gives them a unique wisdom rather than an excessive morbidity. This was usually a red rag to a bull for me, but I kept my alternative smugness in check, and managed to get out of the interview without disgracing myself.
It was doubly irritating because a couple of days before, we had received an ornate and lengthy letter from the People’s Republic, telling us with decorously phrased sorrow that we could not visit North Korea. There had been a squabble at the UN, and in a fit of pique they were cancelling our visit. We were in several minds about this. It was impossible to leap to the defence of a regime which didn’t merely sack its defence minister, but obliterated him with an anti-aircraft rocket. We were also cautious about going since their quarantine regime for Ebola was three weeks in solitary confinement. But, however wrong-headed to many, inclusivity was inclusivity, and we were still determined. So I said nothing about the decorously phrased letter.
The interview concluded, I now had a couple of hours to kill before the later discussion programme, which would be on Radio 3. The area around the BBC goes fairly quiet after seven, but I spotted across the road a very promising-looking restaurant. The member of our press department who was babysitting me had an equal fondness for top tucker, so we settled down for some good nosh and a little lightening of stress. Fine food demanded fine wine, and days of tension sharpened the thirst as well. A couple of bottles disappeared at some speed, and just when we were considering concluding with a digestif, we realised that I had minus five minutes to make it back to Broadcasting House. I dashed unsteadily back across the road for the second time that day, and was met by a producer hopping up and down with nervousness. We jogged to lifts and sprinted along corridors, and I was bundled into a small round-table studio where my fellow guests were settled. The countdown to transmission had already begun.
This was another moment when I should have called time on the day. The atmosphere was various degrees of Arctic, and I realised in a flash that the three other guests had been sitting in one of the BBC’s dead-soul hospitality rooms for an hour or so. They looked like they had been sipping vinegar, with a heavy twist of lemon. They were also all clearly from the tribe of academe, a tribe with whom I had a patchy record. These three looked the antithesis of predisposed towards me. In the thirty-five seconds left before we began, I decided to see how a little bonhomie might go down by charging around the room, shaking hands and introducing myself. They all rocked backwards away from me, no doubt perturbed by my unsteady motion and also by the large red-wine stain empurpling my shirt. It wasn’t the ideal start.
The wise man, at that point, would have left the room. But such wisdom was never my strong point, and the programme had begun before I had had time to think. The theme was Global Shakespeare, and it took me a short while to orient myself as to what the argument was supposed to be about. I filled those moments with a brief speech about how marvellous the Globe was and how all-round glorious the tour was. My fellow guests looked at me with a pitying contempt. Global Shakespeare seemed to me such a self-evidently great thing that I was at a loss as to how we were to fill up forty-five minutes of radio with blather about the wonders of the Stratford man. But I learnt quickly from the others’ opening statements that I was in the wrong. It seemed that much International Bardery was not a good thing. Since two of the academics ran a course devoted to Global Shakespeare, it seemed rather peculiar that they were arguing against their own livelihood, but there you go. Everyone needs a different reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Having invited many of the world’s countries to come to us with our Globe to Globe festival, and now touring our Hamlet to many countries that had never seen a Shakespeare production before, I rather foolishly thought I was in a strong position. The reciprocity of this conversation about and through Shakespeare seemed to me a great way for Nation to Talk, in a very BBC way, to Nation. We had only felt entitled to take our tour to the world on three conditions: that the cast was multicultural, that we played to people and not governments, and that it was seen as a response to our previous hosting of Shakespeare from other countries.
I had not realised the depth of our perfidy. It seemed that for two of the others there, anything to do with Shakespeare that involved the United Kingdom, whether it travelled from there or to there, was tainted with all things evil: the East India Company, colonialism, capitalism, soft power, cultural imperialism, you name it. It was impossible to do anything without knowledge of such history, and if the knowledge was there, so too must be the taint. The only people free to do Shakespeare, it seemed, were those who had no contact with the United Kingdom. They could produce these plays, and tour them to other countries, free from all such stains, and with an appropriate virtue and honesty. Their argument may well have been more subtle than that, it probably
was, but that’s how it appeared to me in my befuddlement.
There are a thousand and one arguments, passionate, cool and profound, to be made against this. After a long day, bad traffic and a bottle of wine, I wasn’t the man to make them. There’s an old Tommy Cooper sketch where he gives us his detailed and imaginative version of the Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy. This involves him putting a hat on and saying, ‘Good, good, good’, and then taking it off, turning his head decisively, and saying, ‘Evil, evil, evil.’ That’s it. I found myself invoking his spirit and muttering ‘Evil, evil, evil’ under my breath whenever I was being told off for doing Shakespeare and being British. That’s in the few moments when I wasn’t chanting ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong’ in an infantile manner. I was being boxed into the corner as the wicked white man. Awkwardly for everyone, I was doing most of the boxing myself. But I was a dead man as I entered.
I recovered a little when one of them told me that our tour was compromised since it only played to dignitaries wherever it went. This was so wholly and utterly at odds with the truth, and since I was fresh back from seeing it play to thousands in East Africa, all of whom were admitted for free, that I regained some traction in the room. But since that lie – the story that Shakespeare is the posh playing to the posh – is such an attractive nonsense, I could sense the synaptic speed with which this untruth flew over the radio waves and into people’s minds. When I stated the truth, that we played to huge crowds of everybody, most allowed in for free, that our tour was all about people meeting, people listening and people communicating, I could feel the lumpen slowness with which it struggled to haul its way out of the room. An untruth about how cynically awful the world is will always move at lightning speed, and a truth about the world’s clumsy potential for goodness will always struggle to catch up.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 17