Any ground recovered was lost on the question of ownership. I proffered the thought that these plays had been offered up into the world by a disinterested author, an imperfect printing process, and had since then floated through the world free of copyright, and free of claim, for anyone in the world to do what they will with them. This position turned out to be crushingly naïve. The previously forgiving one of the three scolded me that these plays were apparently entangled in and strangled by chains of ownership from the moment they were born. First, the company of actors, then the printer, then the shop they were sold in, then everyone who had interacted with them since – they had all covered these plays with their sticky fingerprints of ownership. If I had had the puff, I might have argued the point, but it was late in the programme, and I wasn’t good for much more than barking ‘wrong’ and muttering ‘evil, evil, evil’.
I left the studio and turned on my mobile. I knew I had been comprehensively bested, but one still lives in hope. The flat absence of ‘well done’ messages told its own story. An enthusiastic kicking on social media amplified it. In truth, I had been boorish and had undermined the legitimacy of my arguments with a bullying inarticulacy.
It’s hard even when sober and sharp to argue with the aggressive meagreness of this attitude. Producing Shakespeare has always relied more than anything on joy, on innocence and on enthusiasm. But try arguing for those three at a congress of Shakespeare scholars. Without looking like a blithering Pollyanna. For many of the academic community, but not all, these beautiful words left flimsily on paper cannot just be that – beautiful words on flimsy paper. They have got to be about territorialism and control and ownership, fundamentally because those arguing the case want more than anything else to be the owners. They want to be the hieratically ordained priest caste, who can tell others how to enjoy them. The circumstances of the play’s productions have to be about power and influence and negotiation, so that they can be the arbiters of how such transactions take place.
Ultimately, a boy in Montevideo, or a girl in Manchester, wake up one morning, and are tickled by the thought of putting on a Shakespeare play. Their primary motors are threefold. First, they love the plays. Second, they think it will be fun. Third, they think that putting on the plays will enable them to kiss whichever combinations of boys and girls they fancy kissing. Those innocent desires sit at the heart of all play production, whether it be a group of kids in a favela, or a Broadway show, or a piece of Polish avant-garde gloom.
It is the same motor which drove us to put on our tour. Without the kissing, of course – we’re too old for that. At the heart of the project, as with all at the Globe, was a blithe innocent desire to present Shakespeare. We are aware that such innocence is compromised, that the world is full of different shading, and that there is no shortage of folk waiting to exploit and manipulate such innocence. But what can you do in the face of all the world’s squalidness and impurity? Try to absorb and answer all of it, every detail in its immensity, acknowledge every shred, and then what? Adapt your work to answer each and every one of the world’s critiques and concerns? I have seen the results of that approach, the despairing attempts to pre-emptively self-exonerate in the face of all possible attacks. It leads to work that is so at pains to be morally upright that it is artistically inert. An aesthetic and moral paralysis, terrified into stasis by the imagined judgement of others. Or do you absorb and understand as much as you can, and then walk forwards, your heart and your laughter pushing you on, and try to show the world something new? You consider and reflect, and then you have two choices, to retreat into self-editing and self-reflection, or you move forwards. We moved forwards.
* * *
As a double irony, in radio disaster No. 1, we were attacked for intending to visit North Korea, just after we were told we couldn’t go, and in radio disaster No. 2, we were attacked for cultural imperialism, just as we were in the middle of a row with the British Council. The BC had proved a confounding partner thus far. Many of their officers on the ground around the world had proved supportive and vital partners. They had found us promoters, assisted with advice, drummed up audiences, put us in touch with good local people – even in a very few cases they had given us tiny sums. We always wanted more money – in that sense we were desperate to be a bit more imperialist. Most of the officers were a credit to the UK, young, fired up and deeply connected to the cultures of the countries they were working in. A few were less than great, archaic survivors from a different era, airily saying to us as we arrived, ‘God, it’s good to have some culture here at last’, in the face of countries who had been building temples when Britons had been quizzical about the purpose of toilets. What confused us was the ambivalence of the British Council in the centre, in London.
The British Council is one of those British institutions that often seems strangely at odds with its own purpose. It constructs itself, like many large British institutions, as a fortress, and its first instinct is always to defend the walls of its own fortress. Even if you approach offering it exactly what it wants. The prehistoric simplicity of what we were doing – taking a play to people and countries that had never seen it before, meeting and encountering artists and audiences along the way – was so pornographically simple, and spoke so directly to the original purpose of the BC, as to be obscene in their eyes. We were not the only people confounded by this. The British Council officers on the ground were as confused as to why the BC’s centre was so lacking in commitment. After two years of chivvying them for a response, one of their chief timeservers sent us a blood-boilingly dumb email saying our tour lacked an element of dialogue. I hit the roof and got drawn into a tit-for-tat abusive email exchange, which I always find strangely enjoyable but which is also strategically very dumb. It concluded with such naked rudeness on my part that we had burnt our boats for good with the British Council. All this at just the moment earnest academics were telling us off for being pawns of British government policy.
To be honest, the mid-point of the tour was problematic in many ways, not least financially. We were attempting to achieve the tour without any extra money, just as the Globe operates without any subsidy or any unearned income. We were proud of our capacity to wash our own face. The premise of the tour was straightforward. We would charge the wealthy countries over the odds, and the profit we made from them would subsidise the less wealthy countries. Getting in and out of a country cost an average of about £15,000, so the high fees we could charge say Germany would cover our visits to less well-off countries. (Ethiopia offered us, with an affecting pride, a fee of £55, to play two performances in their National Theatre to 4,000 people). It was a simple plan, but with one structural flaw. Sadly, and cruelly, there are a whole lot more poor countries in the world than there are rich ones. Two-thirds of the countries we were visiting couldn’t get close to covering our costs, and we would have had to charge astronomical amounts to the wealthier to cross-subsidise. Welcome to the world, many might say, and rightly.
The problem had been brewing for a while, and had now become clear to us, and to our Board of Trustees. This admirable group habitually, during my time at the globe, made everyone else’s sangfroid look like screaming hysteria. Tell them that you were launching an international festival, building a new theatre, creating a new Video On Demand platform, or sending out a tour to every country in the world, and they reacted as if nothing had happened, though with a slight stiffening of their collective posture as if someone had done a small fart in the corner of the room but no one had worked out where it came from. However, tell them that a season or a project was in danger of losing money, and they reacted as if a door had been flung open and an Arctic wind had swept in. They became frosty and severe. In many ways, the ideal board.
We had sorted out a solution before the problem grew too large, a problem which involved cost-cutting, shifting of resources and a lot of extra work and performances at the Globe to cover the hole left by the tour. The solution, quite rightly, had to be analys
ed and then approved in a number of semi-frazzled emergency meetings and across more spreadsheets than were good for man or computer. The degree of concern was justifiable, but at that moment was like a fallen tree across the road, draining energy and commitment away from what mattered.
* * *
So here we were at the halfway point, the tour just finishing a life-and art-affirming leg around Africa, surrounded by the full array of British mechanisms to hinder and slow endeavour – the media, the academics, the apparatchiks, the governance – all out lancing any bubble of adventure or connection which crossed their path. Or so it seemed to our paranoid selves.
We were having a collective Hamlet moment. The play was starting to make us see the world through its own perspective. Towards the conclusion of ‘To be, or not to be . . .’, Hamlet looks out into the world and sees the enemies who have stood foursquare in the face of joy and justice since humankind started building communities that couldn’t fit in a tent:
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. . .
‘Whips and scorns’ is easy enough to parse; the rest are a lexicon of the resentments of a grumpy adolescent or of the grumpy adolescent that stays alive in us all – the oppressor is always wrong; ‘contumely’ is the insulting contempt the powerful have always reserved for the weak (think Simon Cowell); the pangs of despised love is an eruption of broken-heartedness in the middle of political complaint (floating Ophelia back into the room); the delay of the law was a particular complaint of Shakespeare’s own litigious age, but has hardly gone out of fashion; and the last complaint – ‘the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes’ – compacts into one telling phrase every instance one has witnessed of humble goodness queuing up to accept its maltreatment from the shits of the world. This is a foundation stone of Hamlet’s despair – his moral and social awareness – yet it is often bulldozed out of the way to make room for other sources – his psychological failings, or an excess of aesthetic fineness. Hamlet’s sensibility is inseparable from his sense of injustice – he cannot look at the world without seeing its tawdriness and without trying to name it and call time on it.
Claudius is a figure of loathing for Hamlet not only because he killed his father and is sleeping with his mother (though that is a formidable charge sheet). He is also, in Hamlet’s imagination, a figure from the old order, given to heavy-headed revelling, and diplomacy at the end of a gun. Polonius is hated for his manipulative exploitation of his daughter’s beauty, but also for his antique language, for his obfuscations and for the smokescreens he throws up between himself and the truth. Beyond both of them is a state apparatus which can be interpreted in a number of ways – as an arena of medieval brutality or an unfeeling bureaucracy; as a failing state or a reviving tyranny – but from Hamlet’s perspective, it is all shoddy and tired and bad.
‘Denmark’s a prison’ at best, and beyond that the world, too, ‘a goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons’. It is a place of rampant hypocrisy, where ‘those that would make mows at him [Claudius] while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little’. A place where ‘one may smile and smile and be a villain’. (Insecure actors playing Claudius, lacking guidance from their directors, have often taken this comment too literally as a character note and spent hours wandering the stage in a permanent state of rictus.) This last insight is such a trite one you feel a brain as sharp as Hamlet’s should have got there a little earlier, but anger has a capacity for infantilising the intellect. I expect even the Dalai Lama gets morally diminished in a traffic jam. The behaviour of the Danish court is such that it makes of Hamlet both a tortured genius and an outraged eight-year-old.
Hamlet places himself in the long line going back to Orestes, and forward to Jimmy Porter, Bob Dylan and Rooster Byron, blessed with an overflow of sensibility that cannot find a context or a home to live in, and so must hate the world which inflicts such endless bruising. Thus all else becomes the enemy, whether it be the establishment, the man, political correctness, whatever force has taken society beyond coherence into rigid conformity. Hamlet is the prince of such eloquent complainers, the archetype for all who feel oppressed by the clumsy stupidity of the world.
Yet, as with much complaint of this sort, his is excessive. Claudius on the evidence of the play is not just the villain he wants him to be – he has an active insight and conscience of his own. Polonius is not just ‘the wretched, rash, intruding fool’ that Hamlet labels him. He has children who love him, and a highly active, if wayward, intelligence. Denmark, though it has an act of definitive rottenness at its core, and seems messy and stumbly, is not the bleak antechamber to hell of Macbeth’s Scotland, or the blasted loveless dysfunction of Lear’s England. When Shakespeare wanted to write a proper dystopia, he did. With Elsinore, he has the brakes on.
Why? It’s hard to say, but it appears there was a desire to show that Denmark was not the only problem: Hamlet was part of it as well. A fine-tuned sensibility is a beautiful thing, but it’s also tough to fit into the world. Orthodoxies and hegemonies need opposition, but once opposition is let loose, it’s impossible to tell it to stop. And should it stop? Isn’t such rebellion most useful when most excessive, even when it parts company from the proof of sense? But when it does, doesn’t it become wearing? Bob Dylan is a consistent pleasure, touching the spirit in its loneliest and quietest place, but it’s always pleasant to break his tone with a burst of Sam Cooke and ‘Everybody Loves To Cha-Cha-Cha’. Hamlet is exemplary, and to be so he has to be extreme, but he’s not necessarily someone for every hour of the day.
All paranoia, once set running, is hard to contain. Ours had grown excessive, in sympathy with our eponymous hero. The world seemed against us, when it was in fact more often being helpful. Our board, though on the calm side, had sanctioned and approved one of the most high-risk theatrical adventures ever, and had been consistently steadfast in the face of substantial risk. The British Council, though deadened at its centre, included a host of extraordinary people working in thoughtful and enlivening ways to make a contribution to the world’s culture. The academic community, though several seemed immured in their own fear and loathing, had proven huge and generous friends to the entire Globe project.
A moment comes within any cycle of perceived injustice, when a good sleep, or a chance occurrence, or a little bit of stray happiness lends perspective, and reminds one that the world is far from all bad, and that the good sits clumsily alongside the bad. For Hamlet, that moment never arrives. The walls close in inexorably, his darkest suspicions are proven true, and thus make his narrative a tragic one. For many of the rest of us, thankfully, the comic tone walks in and throws a little sunshine around.
The corrective for us proved, as it always has, our reconnection with the company. Spending time with them, and experiencing at first hand the work they were doing, had always proved the best panacea. We flew out en masse to Madrid. Matt, who had spent a year playing Laertes, Horatio, Guildenstern et al., had been quietly preparing his own Hamlet, and this was to be his first night. He was astonishing, nerveless as an assassin, not dropping a stitch all evening, and offering up his own, eloquent, sweet-natured Prince. All the other actors rose up to meet him, and gave one of the best performances I had seen. Their characters were so ingrained in their bodies by this time, there was a real sense of not watching actors playing parts, but of meeting people. It felt like Ophelia and Claudius and Gertrude and the rest had walked into the room. We were in a modern theatre, with a lively and engaged audience, all 600 of whom rose to their feet and brought the company back and back at the end. Argument and suspicions and paranoias blew away.
Something of the insouciant, low-shouldered, rolling ease of Madrid
seemed to have informed the show. Spanish theatre and Spanish actors have an innate charisma, an ability to stand still and declare ‘I am here’, which is the envy of other nations. They call it duende, and it’s hard to quantify. They can be natural and melodramatic at the same moment. You can see it in a Javier Bardem or an Antonio Banderas. They say ‘I love you’, and you want to cheer, as if they are saying it on behalf of everyone else. They can carry narratives, or hold physical positions, which in anyone else would look ridiculous, but their blend of self-possession and style pull it off. Shakespeare’s theatre, one imagines, had a little of this same rooted physical presence, this earthed sexuality, though blended with a strong twist of Nordic angst. Our actors could only borrow such glamour in passing, but they borrowed well.
We adapted socially as well, and came over all Iberian. We commandeered the pavement outside our hotel, and forty or fifty people tapas’d and laughed. I said some words of congratulations to the new Hamlet and to the company on achieving ninety-seven countries in a year, and of our excitement at the tasks and challenges ahead. Then a fleet of taxis arrived and whisked everyone off into the night in search of Madrid’s after-hours carnival fun. They spent the night dancing with a transvestite contortionist. I don’t know if this was the dialogue which the British Council were looking for in their cultural endeavours, but they were certainly having an effect.
The next day, wandering around Madrid, aimlessly enjoying the stories and histories which pack themselves into every street corner, and relishing the blissful curiosity of unpacking such stories, a flash mob invaded a square and started doing swing dancing. Aware as I am that such demonstrations are about reclaiming space and subverting hierarchies and all that anti-jazz, there was something so gloriously, innocently happy about what they were doing, and the pleasure they were providing, that it blew the remainder of any blues away.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 18