Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  Eventually, I passed through without anyone questioning why I was there, or indeed showing the faintest interest. On the other side, I found a fellow cultural enricher, a delightful climate-change scientist, here to lecture. A passionate believer in the importance of stopping the use of fossil fuels, coming to lecture in Saudi Arabia seemed rather like putting your head into the lion’s mouth, and all the better for that. We both knew little about the university – King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) – which we were visiting, and tried to fill out details as we drove through the desert night. The one thing we knew for certain was that the university was co-ed, the first and only one of its kind in Saudi, and for that reason it had invoked the ire of the less progressive. It was on an Al Qaeda hitlist. Some men will go an awfully long and violent way to stop women being educated to understand fully and completely what comprehensive knobs the men are. There were three heavy levels of security to pass through to get onto campus: concrete blocks across the roads, serious artillery at every checkpoint and impressively glaring soldiers. Once through security, we drove on into a pristine paradise weirdly empty of people.

  At our hotel, I was met by our host, a brave and sweet American woman who seemed strung out by nerves, like a violin string pulled too tight. In vivid contrast, Amanda rocked up looking far from nervous. In the course of the day, she and a couple of the others from the company had found a professor who had discovered innovative ways of utilising the spartan desert resources and had been brewing his own hooch. Amanda was completely off her face, swinging her laundry bag around merrily. She tried rather comically to act normal for a bit, then leant in and whispered conspiratorially, ‘I’m a little bit pissed, you know’, which I think they had worked out on Mars. She tried rather clumsily to moonwalk backwards out of the foyer. This didn’t lessen the nerves of our host.

  Hungry for knowledge, I sat our host down and asked for more info. A violinist herself – why do musicians come to resemble their instruments? – she had come to KAUST accompanying her husband, a leading light in computer technology. He was in part responsible for the building of the eighth biggest super-computer in the world, which was installed here. The university was all tech and engineering, was entirely for graduate students, had astonishing resources for research, and had proved a magnet for top boffins from all over the world, as well as Saudi Arabia itself. The previous Saudi king, whose record of oppression at home and exporting chaos abroad was notable, seems to have been discreetly more liberal than he was allowed to appear. A no-holds-barred modern university was his great dream, and, yes, one with women in it. He went to the government and tentatively suggested it, but was screamed out of town by the ultra-Wahabist Ministry of Education. Undeterred, and probably a little piqued (it was his kingdom after all), the King decided to go it alone and build a university himself. Twenty billion dollars later, the astonishing campus sits proud and clean on land carved out of sea and desert. It was knocked up in less than 1,000 days. It seems to have been built too fast for the world to catch up, and is yet to be filled with students. The most bewildered people are the inhabitants of the small and ancient fishing town which nestles alongside the university. Their rough seaside cafes, having enjoyed two millennia of relaxed evenings muttering about the day’s catch, now fill up with refugees from MIT and Stanford talking hyperspace.

  Whether built from the King’s guilt or from the King’s hope was hard to say, but it was a remarkable place. My host’s nerves were attenuated, but her determination to make the best of this place, and to change the space she was in, was inspiring. The university campus was the only place in Saudi where women were allowed to drive, and within that context for her to have managed to get us there was some achievement. It was the early stages of chiselling fertility out of rocky soil, from which much can bloom.

  * * *

  The campus was an eerie replica of The Truman Show. The wall of heat you walked into as you stepped outdoors hazed the brain as well as the sky, everything shifted aqueous, and a smear of Vaseline appeared round the edge of reality like a film from the over-bright Technicolor 1950s. Long, neat rows of identical homes lined pristine roads. They were built from a pale-pink stone that was soft on the eye in the blasting heat and under the searing blue sky. Explosions of flower-dazzle burst out like camp fireworks from the earth. The sense of artificial composition was enhanced by the regularly spaced palm trees (palm trees have a hard time looking real anywhere, don’t they?). The only jarring note was the result of natural aesthetics – all the bigger green patches were garlanded with hollowed-out circles of rock, big stony bracelets, oxtail-shaped lumps of the local geology, nature’s own Henry Moores.

  These eloquent lumps of rock sat in front of some of the most beautiful modern architecture I have seen, gently sleek new buildings floating in the sky. Everywhere I looked I saw echoes of classical painting as huge but human edifices of wood and glass led the eye gently towards newly created piazzas or down towards the sea. Air, sea and building sat together with a natural grace. No matter that the whole was a confection from one of J.G. Ballard’s dystopian nightmares, no matter that beyond the segregationist fence there were heaps of rubbish; the effect, while within it, was delightful. Most of the time the eye was led towards a beacon, the beacon of learning standing skyscraper tall on a lump of rock in the Red Sea. The beacon had a powerful light at its apex, together with a sculpted eagle. It was placed there so the King could see it from his nearby island and be reminded of all the good he had done. This Napoleonic grandiosity sat awkwardly beside the modernity elsewhere.

  The theatre was absurdly well appointed. It was too big, like almost all modern playhouses, but in terms of kit better equipped than most national theatres. It felt brand new and unused, rather like an over-eager golfer who turns up at a match with all the stuff but no idea how to use it. There was tension about photography. The company were uneasy about photographs being taken when what we were doing was potentially going to enrage many. I was inclined to be more relaxed about it, until the theatre told me that they could not photograph the audience because the Saudi women in the audience could not be seen to have been there. It seemed a bit rum to protect the audience and not the actors, so we barred cameras.

  Then the simple miracle of people turning up for a show began. No matter that this was a historic event, or a political one, or a dangerous one, the first show was a matinee, and people simply turned up in their droves excited to be there. What greater force of happy innocence is there in the world than people turning up in high expectation for a show? The security around the building was light, and there was a festival atmosphere. The women seemed exceptionally excited, and thankfully no one was belabouring them (or us) with speeches or posters or literature. Eyes were shining bright even behind substantial burqas, and smiles were flashing wide underneath dazzle-bright hajibs. There were sufficient American girls to break the atmosphere with noisy whooping, and an astonishingly calm chief of staff, a black woman from Caltech, seemed to be discreetly pulling strings. However achieved, all sailed calmly and happily into a first show to a full house, and a sparky show drew an enthusiastic response.

  A small feeling of deflation descended afterwards. This was a significant moment, we had been told, the first professional show on the Saudi stage featuring both men and women. As with many significant moments, it had all ended up a tiny bit flat. Everyone was so determined to downplay historic moments, everyone conspired so successfully to render them as normal, that they ended up, well, a bit normal. We were also disarmed when a charming Saudi woman came backstage to talk to us, and told us that she was an actress regularly appearing on stage in Jeddah and Riyadh. Clearly someone was doing a bit of exaggerating. But there was a sense of a job well done, in that the atmosphere had been relaxed and free, and the show enjoyed. The work of our hosts in attempting something brave and pulling it off had been rewarded.

  I wandered off with one of the actors to have a coffee, and listened to a story o
f a broken relationship, one of the several that had been crushed on the anvil of the tour. It was not easy to maintain a long-distance relationship while whirligigging around the globe. But the conclusion of this relationship had been more than a little brutal, and the actor was smarting.

  I needed a little space, as my feet had hardly touched the ground, so I set off for a stroll. There is an uncanny moment in countries on this latitude as the day is ending. For an hour or so before night sets in, with the heat ebbing and the light softening, and with the electrical power of the day still stored in sand and rock and masonry, and with each emitting a reciprocal glow, for a brief moment, all seems still and grave, refulgent and invested. There is a swimming temperature in the air, and in matter, cool and heat shifting and curving around each other. Greene writes about it in The Heart of the Matter, how that hour, with its peculiar magic, redeems the stifling nihilism of the day.

  The centrepiece of the campus was a mosque, and I headed towards it. It was grand but not overwhelming. Its cool white walls topped with a startling blue minaret, together with interlocking triangles of pillars outside, made it look like a miracle of shade for the soul in a hot world. The light started to dance the same shifting quadrille as the heat, with night and day slipping in and out of each other’s hold, the sun collapsing into the Red Sea, the white walls still uttering their lambent murmur, and the dark starting to take over in between. The mosque was surrounded by a network of inlets running off from the Red Sea in a successful imitation of Amsterdam and Venice. The walkways around the inlets were a startling white, the water a sharp aquamarine. Between the heat, the light and the water, a soft dampness conjured itself in the evening air, and right at that moment the muezzin poured out his song. Its clarity and its yearning musicality pierced like a prayer. I was alone on this still dreamily empty campus, and for a moment Islam made a pure and simple sense, and I, who had come to scoff, was wholly disarmed and felt naked before its soft power. The sense of peace was as great as I have known, as well as the sense of a presence softly alive, immanent in the milky light.

  The evening show was packed – students, teachers, visitors all crammed in, alive to every moment of a strong performance, which was greeted with a rousing reception at the end. Afterwards, we headed off for a supper with many of our hosts – American, French, African and Saudi. I was surrounded by witty and brilliant mathematicians who talked at a level of abstraction and a machine-gun pace I found it hard to keep up with, but the intellectual fizz was intoxicating. They were eager to tell us about their university and its achievements. About 25 per cent of the university population is Saudi. The rest were attracted by the research possibilities, but also by the chance for the university to effect change. They were there to do original work and to think original thoughts, but also to demonstrate the social use and the importance of such work and such thoughts. As one of them – a veteran of several posts at important Western universities – said, it was invigorating to be at a university where thought itself was radical. So many Western homes of higher education were now mired in an obsession with status, with territorial battles and with egos nervously ring-fencing their own domain, that the whole purpose of a university had been misplaced. As one of them said, ‘Every university I’ve worked at before is so anxious to sit on its own dignity that it forgets to be a university.’ Everyone talks up their own meaning, but there did seem something urgently true about this university’s claim. Universities are there to change the world, to create new tunes which the rest of the world samples and learns to dance to or to ignore.

  Hamlet is, of course, a play about a student. Hamlet is on leave from university at Wittenberg. His friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern visit from there, and bring with them a bracing tonic of playful student philosophising. Claudius is keen to keep Hamlet in Elsinore to keep an eye on him, but also because he seems suspicious of Wittenberg itself. Gertrude says at one point of her son, as if it is proof of his instability, ‘Here he comes, reading!’ Polonius questions him on the content of his book as if defusing a bomb. Obviously with Wittenberg there were many Protestant over- and under-tones, but there is also the simple fact of learning, and of new thought. Calling someone a ‘student’ is often now done satirically or as an insult; it is bracing to recall a day when the name implied something new and radical. To be a student in this Saudi university had that bracing thrill, as it did for Hamlet.

  For Hamlet, the problem is the thought he has been infected with. University has created a kaleidoscope of possibilities within him, which the antique heaviness of Elsinore and the personal situation he is trapped within cannot accommodate. ‘What a piece of work is a man. . .’ is the complaint of someone who has been shown such possibility and finds it hard to reconcile with reality. ‘Denmark is a prison’, but it is mainly ‘thinking that makes it so’. Who hasn’t been on that journey to a place of fresh and original thought, then felt a suffocating heaviness on returning home, where no one understands the newness bubbling away inside? Hamlet is the paradigm for every young buck or buckess who escapes a way of thinking and then has to deal with the pain of having lost their previous connections, whether wearing artful black or a burqa.

  In the words of Erasmus, the man who dreamt up many of the ideals of the education system which Shakespeare grew up within, ‘praecipuam reipublicae spem sitam esse in recta educatione puerorum’ (the first hope of the republic lies in the proper education of its boys). This principle was at the heart of the Tudor grammar-school revolution, as Jonathan Bate has brilliantly uncovered. It is the reason why those of the three generations before Shakespeare endowed such schools so lavishly. They believed that drumming the wise saws of the ancients into young boys for long hours on end would help them grow to be active in society, and wise in those actions. The essence of civility for northern Europeans, the essence for good humanity almost, was a proper education in the arts. Shakespeare himself had a sceptical view of this ideal, since many of his most-educated characters show the least humanity, and many of his least learned the most civility. Hamlet himself is a demonstration of the impossible collection of expectations that such a dream can place on a single individual.

  The crucial word in the Latin tag above is, of course, ‘puerorum’, of boys. While young men in the Tudor age walked slowly to schools to be force-fed Ovid, young women were not even allowed out. They were expected to stay at home and master their sewing. Many rebelled against this, of course, and the number of educated female prodigies in the Elizabethan age is striking, but the tide was against them. As it continued to be for several centuries. The battles for full educational access were fought over a long time here in the West, just as they are being fought with a fresh ferocity and violence elsewhere in the world now, as Malala Yousafzai’s case has shown. What education should be is open to question, but there is little doubt that some is better than none, and to deny the chance to anyone, man or woman, is a crime. Who shall be happy if not everyone?

  From the moment of my arrival in Saudi, I had been with strong and independent women who were choosing to be here and make a difference: the climate-change scientist here to speak against the economic basis of this nation; our host who had put the whole enrichment programme together; the chief of staff gently pulling the strings of much of the university; our own actresses and stage managers; and, most impressively, the young women in the audience, with a careless insouciance and a carefree shrug, going against the dictates of much of their own world. Finally, the existence of the play of Hamlet is its own ringing bell for the virtues of education. That a boy, Shakespeare, whose father was illiterate, could be brought to a place of such eloquence and wisdom and freedom of thought is its own endorsement. Shakespeare himself never made it to a university, but grammar school served him well.

  We walked back through the campus to our hotel, surrounded by an excited gaggle of students. Everyone was bushed, but my mind was still thrumming away, and I needed to walk out my thoughts. So I set off for a couple of circuits o
f the campus, its emptiness and quiet now complemented by the dark. The same peace reigned. The hotel was surrounded by some eccentric species of flower which blooms and shines most completely at night. I silently paid respect to whichever botanical virtuoso had painted the night in such dazzling colours.

  On my meander, I wandered into the piazza where I had sat earlier with the broken-hearted actor. Three students, two boys and a girl, all Saudi, were sitting in the night emptiness on wicker chairs talking animatedly. I asked them for a light, and fell into conversation with them. They had seen Hamlet, and were snapped alert with excited thought. They told me it was the politics that thrilled them, a young man going against his own mother, and a king, and the state apparatus. They had no specific idea what Hamlet wanted, but they knew that he wanted something different, something new, and that he wanted freedom from the past. We talked about what we wanted, and they asked me to define my desires. I never know how to answer that, so offered them Chekhov’s pithy definition: ‘All I ask is freedom from lies, and freedom from violence.’ They pretended to like it, but it is a desire from a privileged place, and did not speak to their needs. I asked for their definition, and the girl swiftly replied with a relaxed and automatic clarity, ‘We want freedom from want and need, we want freedom to contribute, and we want freedom to love.’ The boys nodded calmly, and there was little more to add. I left them to continue their conversation.