Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  I walked down in happy loneliness to the sea, and reflected on the words of the young woman. They turned slowly in my mind like a key in a lock. I thought of the seductive sobriety and calm of Islam, or at least this very cosseted bit of it. Then I saw in sharp relief, as if through an inverting mirror, the context beyond the wire. The virtues of this place, and the palpable relief of those who enjoy them, exposed the nature of the world beyond it. This was a utopia, a manifestly fake one, thrown up in 1,000 days, and like all utopias part of its process was to expose the wrongness of the world it existed in. Thomas More wrote his Utopia as a dream of a better world, but also as a critique of his own. This fenced-in modernity, where men and women walk and talk together in something close to parity, was a living critique of the world beyond the fence and the machine guns. A critique thrown up by the dream of a dying king, in a fairy-tale denial of the drift of the rest of his life. Just as Hamlet’s fresh and bright new perspective exposes much of his own world, the disjunct between the dream here and the reality beyond – a country which subjugates women, promulgates Wahabi closed-mindedness and coordinates the flow of wealth into the hands of a kleptocratic royal family – that out-of-jointness, together with the simplicity of the young woman’s words, gifted me a clarity about much that I had seen. A clarity about problems that run through South America, Africa, China, Europe, North America, everywhere. Problems that recur over and over, wherever humans botch together an attempt at a society.

  Freedom from want and need. . . setting the template for all else, the ground zero of our collective inhumanity, the inequity of wealth, the continuing cruelty and insanity of which shames all, and hinders whatever other blundering nonsense we talk about natural justice. There is little point debating small points of goodness, or the lack of it, when we live in a global society which amounts for many to not much more than a torture chamber of destitution and want. A torture chamber which most of us participate in the maintenance and continuance of. Abu Ghraib wasn’t horrifying because it was exceptional; it was horrifying because it was so true.

  Freedom to contribute. . . Everyone, no matter on what scale, whether on the street corner or in the parliament building, whether in the New York Times or in a local rag, everyone wants to speak and be heard and be allowed to affect their environment. They all want to contribute, to help, to change. They all should be allowed to. Any society has to be created to give sufficient numbers, if not everyone, the outlets for their energies, and the platforms for their ideas. There has to be a fluid and changeable set of opportunities for contributions, and a fair system for recognising such contributions. When that desire to contribute is thwarted and checked, as is the case so miserably here in Saudi, then it is a witches’ brew.

  And freedom to love. . . If that is singular or prodigious, gay or straight, or any combination – everyone should be able to love in the way they want to love. No one individual, no cleric, no despot, no bureaucrat, no anybody should stand in the way of that. Elena Ferrante says that ‘If love is exiled from cities, their good nature becomes an evil nature.’

  These three conditions affect each other, result from each other, and interweave with each other. But where all three are negative, where economic inequity cripples freedom of thought and heart, where social restrictions stop people from having a voice or being able to contribute, or when love is policed or proscribed, then you have the recipe for nihilistic violence. That is the negative we live in, or too many live in, or are allowed to live in. That is our ridiculous tragedy and comedy, when its inverse, the positive, can bloom like a night flower so simply.

  These thoughts arrived out of the dark-blue air as I ambled my way around the sea views, the artificial lakes and the empty walkways of the night campus. A university of hope, surrounded by despair, living at an extreme between the wished-for and the reality. The light on the top of the King’s beacon of learning flashing away in the distance.

  The next day, we drove back though tens of miles of flat desert sprawl. The beguiling wilderness was strewn with old rubber tyres, the water bottles of seemingly all the world, and a desert-wide confetti of plastic bags. The astonishing durability of rock and of synthetics.

  Shortly before the airport was reached, a beaten-up two-storey shack sat with a shabby dignity by the motorway, the tallest skyscrapers in the world looming in the far distance. It had a sign across its front like an old Wild West bank. ‘The National Society for Human Rights’ it read.

  116 Taiwan, Taipei

  Wellspring Theater

  6 July 2015

  117 Cambodia, Phnom Penh

  Royal University of Phnom Penh Auditorium

  8 July

  118 Laos, Vientiane

  National Cultural Hall

  10 July

  119 Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City

  GEM Centre

  13 July

  120 Bangladesh, Dhaka

  National Theatre

  15 July

  121 China, Shanghai

  Shanghai Theatre Academy

  China, Beijing

  5–9 August

  1–2 August

  122 Mongolia, Ulan Bator

  The State Academic Theatre of Drama

  12 August

  123 South Korea, Seoul

  Marronnier Park

  15–16 August

  124 Japan, Tokyo

  Saitama Arts Theater

  19–20 August

  12

  THE WORLD IN REVOLT

  HAMLET Let Hercules himself do what he may,

  The cat will mew and dog will have his day.

  Act 5, Scene 1

  A HOST OF PHOTOS HUNG from a washing line between two lamp posts on the main drag of Bogotá, Colombia. It was a bank holiday, and the streets had been given over to the people, so no policeman was going to take these photos down, clearly posted by FARC themselves or a subsidiary. These were the pictures, washed out through frequent reproduction into grainy black and white, which you do not get to see on television or in newspapers. Heads with half their skulls blown off in unforgiving close-up, lines of slaughtered bodies laid out like sardines as policemen wander past with a diffident neglect, shattered body parts flung asunder like jigsaw pieces after an explosion. All these images out there on the street as kids wandered past licking their ice creams.

  Just a couple of blocks down, a modest collection of interlocking eighteenth-century buildings around a courtyard housed a national museum. At the centre of the complex was the most delicate icon to inspire a revolution I had encountered. In an upstairs room, lit like a shrine and encased in thick glass, was a chunk of hyper-glazed porcelain, its mottled whiteness crawling with candied green leaves, small outcrops of jewellery and a brightly coloured slithering snake. Maniacally kitsch, it was hard to credit that this fragment of a vase had been the trigger for fifteen years of revolutionary wars. Or that a national identity was organised around a broken bit of china.

  Just over 200 years before, on the morning of 20 July 1810, a group of criollos, members of the indigenous aristocracy, tired of the bad and disaffected rule of their Spanish masters, stage-managed a theatrical scrap. They carried it out in the centre of Bogotá on a market day, when they knew the right audience would be present, excited and flammable. Organising a dinner to receive a celebrated liberationist, they crossed a teeming square to request from a Spanish merchant, known to be both ultra conservative and a bit of a bell-end, the loan of a vase to adorn their table. The owner of said vase, Llorente, refused in a predictably high-handed manner. The criollos took the vase and broke it with a histrionic flourish. Fists flew, and word spread quickly around the square that the Spaniards had yet again revealed their innate racism. Fists gave way to stones, and before the day was out a people’s junta had been formed, and previously unheard of political demands were being made.

  Of course, the vase was the straw that broke a back straining under a complex weave of social, political and economic causes. But there was something about the i
ncongruity of it, the gaudy kitsch against all the blood later spilt, including that documented in the brutalist photos, that compelled the imagination. There was something deliciously comic about the red-bloodedness of the passion set against the feyness of what provoked it. ‘What did he do? Refused to lend his vase??? OK, that’s it! War!’

  Another sequence of photos in another place gave testament to what followed the vase’s breaking. On the wall of the gents’ toilet of a club in Quito, Ecuador, there was a sombrely presented parade of portraits. It was a sequence of framed photos of the presidents of Ecuador over the last eighty years. Each bristled with self-importance and a visionary gleam, fixing their eye steadfastly towards the future. All presented themselves with the same grave dignity, garlanded with stiff military hats and even stiffer moustaches. Underneath, with no comic comment, there was a small caption outlining the length of their tenure. Some had lasted a creditable decade, some a less creditable couple of years, some no longer than a year, many a couple of months, a disturbing number only a few days, and several ludicrously no longer than a day. It was a fiercely witty joke against their own political turbulence. These countries knew about regime change and revolution in their gut.

  Beginning with the wars of liberation, themselves a shifting of alliances between indigenous peoples, imported slave populations, a Spanish aristocrat class who identified themselves as American, and the distant Spanish rulers, the next two centuries proved a merry-go-round of political change. Civil war followed civil war, with many a cycle revolving around a phenomenon called caudillismo. This involved a charismatic figure, the caudillo, an outsider and a corrective to the current regime, coming in from who knows where and sweeping to power. Each would bring with him a fresh democratic mandate, effective until the next caudillo came along. The caudillos in the photos on the toilet wall are so indistinguishable, a matter of millimetres in the refashioning of their facial hair, it was hard to know what exactly they were offering by way of difference. Violence and revolution were part of the fabric of life in South America in a way they have (almost) ceased to be in the West. Though economic injustice, the bitter legacy of colonialism and interference from outsiders are clearly the prime motors of instability, it was hard not to gain the impression that power was shifted in part because it was the custom, and revolutions happened because people enjoyed them.

  Simón Bolívar, the Liberator of all Liberators (for his fan base, though not for all – Marx took a dim view of his bourgeois aspirations), was something of a Hamlet figure. Borderline bipolar, and brimful of self-loathing, this scion of a grand family brought up in a state of emotional dislocation was capable of astonishing feats of bold action and sustained endurance, and equally capable of collapsing into himself and retreat. He could lead coalitions of soldiers across mountains at one moment, and at another disappear into his own lair for prolonged contemplation. He still presides in effigy over what was Gran Colombia, his statue and face dominating each cityscape. In the centre of Bogotá, his colossal statue stood proud in a colonnaded temple, epically framed between two mountain peaks beyond. However, even revolutionaries need to be turned over around here on a regular basis. Plinth, temple and statue itself were all scribbled over with graffiti. Both of Bolívar’s knees sported posters for a street-art outfit called Canibal Collectif. Remembering the collective apoplexy which accompanied the adornment of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square with a Mohican made of a bright-green piece of turf, lending the great leader a punkish air, it was hard not to offer up a silent cheer.

  Amidst all the technicolour exuberance of the bank-holiday street craziness, there was no escape from a constant impression of political instability. The living statues had a very different tenor from the Disney creations of the West. They loomed like dark figures from a nightmare informed by civil violence. These street performers invoked police spattered in blood, soldiers with melted faces, uniforms with wolfish heads, teeth dripping gobbets of flesh. Bicycles wheeled up and down through the crowds, stopping every ten yards or so for people to observe what sat up six feet tall behind the rider. Tacked on to long poles were essays – not placards but essays – theoretical works about politics. People read them with a grave seriousness before falling into debate.

  Politics shouts itself into life here on the streets, and interweaves closely with culture. A Chilean I met in Lima told me of his company’s approach to political theatre. They boarded buses at opposite ends, shouted a greeting to each other, then across the length of the bus they started a political argument. As their debate got more heated, they walked towards each other. By the time they got to the middle, they were yelling. They then descended into a scrap, which on a given signal they broke and hugged each other. Public dialectics indeed. This was a politics born from hunger and pain, of course, and it would be a crime to sentimentalise it. (I once saw Harold Pinter bearing down, arms outstretched, on a Chilean poet after he had given a public reading. The poet turned and fled, but Pinter was too fast for him, caught him, and then hugged him enthusiastically from behind. It wasn’t a pretty picture.) Yet for all the dangers of romanticising, it was hard not to fall hook, line and sinker for the energy and the brio of this politics. The revolution starts where there is hunger, yes, but also where there is exuberance.

  The Poll Tax Riot of 1989 was one of the most exhilarating afternoons of my life: the palpable sense of power being contested on the streets; the joy of hearing a voice long suppressed being allowed to roar; the reinvention of the physical space of a city by a group giving itself over to a form of judicious frenzy; and the knowledge that many things would change as a result. There was the adrenalin that pumped, indiscriminate and dangerous, but there was also the satisfying noise of a fabric that had been stretched too far and too tight finally tearing, and the release that went with that. When the Gentleman, an otherwise invisible character in Hamlet, bursts in to speak to Gertrude and Claudius with the news that Laertes has returned at the head of a popular revolt, the excitement that he feels pours out of him:

  Save yourself, my Lord.

  The ocean overpeering of his list

  Eats not the flats with more impiteous haste

  Than young Laertes in a riotous head

  O’er bears your officers; the rabble call him Lord

  And, as the world were now but to begin,

  Antiquity forgot, custom not known,

  The ratifiers and props of every word

  They cry ‘Choose we, Laertes shall be King!’ –

  Caps, Hands, and Tongues, applaud it to the clouds –

  ‘Laertes shall be King! Laertes King!’

  It’s kind of him to say ‘Save yourself’ to the King, but you can’t help feeling that his heart is much more strongly in sharing the excitement than in protecting his leader. It also seems joyously crass to go on shouting ‘Laertes shall be King’ in the face of the supposed King himself, but the excitement is undeniable. As always, with his deft draftsman’s touch, Shakespeare catches the irresistible thrill of what the crowd feels, ‘as the world were now about to begin’.

  Sometimes when you see Julius Caesar staged, the assassination of Caesar is followed by a slow and pained regret. Nothing could be further from what Shakespeare wrote. He portrays a group of men intoxicated by the horrible pleasure of violence, who fall into a demented scream-around of ‘Liberty, liberty. . .’ They are sugar-rush children driven insensate by their group dynamic. Shakespeare knew, understood and relished the energy of a good riot. His London was full of them – the apprentice population had trouble distinguishing between what constituted a holiday and what a riot. One of his earliest plays, Henry VI Part 2, takes flight with the rebellion led by Jack Cade, a popular insurrection which almost destroys a king. Shakespeare captures sympathetically the savage wit of the crowd (its catchphrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ – a line which never tires), its giveaway charisma, and its profound and dangerous daftness.

  It was hard for the company
not to consider this as we passed through countries moulded and remoulded in riots, rebellions and revolutions, still boasting the iconography and bearing the scars of all their turbulence. Russell Brand’s book Revolution was passed from hand to hand. Commentary on it varied from the offensive to the appreciative, but it was keeping the conversation lively. In many ways, of course, South America is now a beacon of prosperity, and an education to others in how to combine prosperity with a broadly spread social justice. John, ever the contrarian, read to us from a book called What if Latin America Ruled the World?, a fat economic and historical volume about how the South is going to lead the North into the twenty-second century. We were all loving it so passionately that we offered up cheers. But the history of violence and change was written into the walls, and it sharpened the cut of the political chat. Is Hamlet on the side of the revolutionaries, an emblem for the rage of all those who seek to overturn their present world and give birth to a new future? Or is Shakespeare framing a conservative play to criticise the overturning of the status quo?

  The play sits within an uncertain political moment. Denmark is threatened from without – Fortinbras, a young prince of Norway, carrying an inherited resentment about an old land grab, has ‘sharked up a list of lawless resolutes’. Not only is that line worthy of a Nobel Prize on its own, it conjures up a world nervously trying to accommodate a population of roaming, disaffiliated men of violence. The armaments factories of Denmark are working overtime to hammer out weapons, which never calms the air. Ghosts are walking the battlements, which doesn’t encourage an easy night either. Other nations are starting to think of Denmark as the home of drunkards, and dismissing it ‘with swinish phrase’. That comes from Hamlet, who may be biased, though even Claudius admits that other nations think ‘our state to be disjoint and out of frame’. This tallies with Hamlet’s ‘the time is out of joint’. A whole country is being lied to over the succession, and Shakespeare posits that a state that sits on a lie never sits easy. When Laertes returns, enraged by his father Polonius’s death, a tidal surge of revolutionary enthusiasm follows him into the palace. That Claudius deals with this problem is a tribute to his political skills, but it doesn’t solve the problem.