* * *
Exuberance, exhilaration, grasping the future, street wit and the adrenalin of coordinated protest are all one thing, but revolution has many faces, and many of them are horrifying. In Addis Ababa, we visited the ‘Red Terror’ Martyr’s Memorial Museum, a reminder of the decades of murderous butchery under Mengistu and his Derg regime. A chilling congregation of the detritus of terror – bones and skulls, torture instruments, and the scrips and scraps that the disappeared leave behind them. Mengistu, a figure of towering wrath and vengeance displaced Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, and a couple of years later, by report, smothered him with a pillow as he slept. In an act of ill grace which confounds imagination, he had Selassie’s body buried underneath his own toilet, so that every time he visited his latrine some spirit of vengeance would be appeased. He then announced that he was going to purge the country of the wrong elements, in a speech made outside the theatre we were playing in, and to reinforce his point held up bottles filled with human blood and hurled them to the ground. Long years of mayhem ensued.
Addis Ababa, in sympathy with all the curling a’s within its name, has a bewildering street map, with hardly a straight line within it. The streets, roads and avenues are all curves, twists and circles, concentric and interlocking. Few have names. Roads double back on each other and twist into each other. My usual instinct for the logic of a city was confounded. As well as bewildering, the city looks broken, ground down by poverty and by the desperate attempts of Mengistu and others to force a pattern on it. Off its many highways, bashed and beaten street signs announce a dusty driveway to the ‘Department of Nutritional Wellness’, or the ‘Institute of Community Technology’, all the dilapidated evidence of the influence of old Russian money and a forlorn attempt at Sovietisation. The collectivisation of farming in Ethiopia had wrecked an ecosystem carefully constructed over millennia, leading to famine after famine. What had destroyed the countryside had also broken the city.
We were performing in the National Theatre of Ethiopia, a monstrosity of fascist architecture. Built by Selassie himself, it showed all the evidence of the baleful Mussolini influence. At the back of the huge auditorium, an enormous pod reared up from floor to high ceiling. In the centre of this rocket-like pod, a wide aperture opened out to the whole house. In it was a single grand chair. This was for the Emperor. Every element of the building, a roof of sudden slopes, violent metal streaks of lightning adorning the walls, the whole architectural shaping – all led the eye away from the stage and towards the central temple built for the Emperor. Selassie may have driven the Italian Fascists out, but he seems to have been unable to drive out their madness.
Outside the stage door, there was a broken-down yard, within it an empty swimming pool, and, as if someone had styled it, in the pool a dead dog. The dressing rooms were lit with harsh flat fluorescents, which exposed the detail in the decay. The toilets in front of house stank so strongly of piss it seemed to thicken the air. Even our company’s evergreen resilience came under stress here. The crowd for the show was young, which was great, but the acoustics for the theatre were beyond terrible, and very quickly the company were playing to a tight caucus of people who could hear at the front, and a swelling crowd of people on their mobile phones behind. Cats wandered through the rows of seats. At the end of most rows were small plastic bins, which the cats turned over and then clawed their way through whatever spilled. It was a tyrant’s dream transformed into a rubbish bin.
In a tour of bizarre moments, and within a place that was provoking much thought about revolutions, an odd arrival for the show surprised. Before the audience had been shown in, and as we were doing our cue-to-cue rehearsal, an elderly white gentleman dressed in a three-piece suit, together with his elegantly attired extended family, was shown in. They looked like refugees from an Evelyn Waugh novel. The elderly man was Richard Pankhurst, the surviving son of Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragette of suffragettes. Having opposed the Italian occupation of Abyssinia in the thirties, Pankhurst had continued to campaign for the country through the forties and fifties, and had become a friend to Selassie. In 1956, at his invitation, she moved there with Richard to found a journal. She stayed, and at her death in 1960 received a full state funeral. She is buried alongside the soldiers who fought for liberation from the Italians, the only foreigner in the Holy Trinity Cathedral of Addis Ababa. An exemplary life. The family that remained were courteous, displaying language and manners which seemed to spill out of an Edwardian drawing room.
That night we sat in a hotel and talked about revolution and riot. There was the visit to Maidan, and the sense of a country on the move in the Ukraine. The company had already encountered the residue of civil unrest across the countries of North Africa they had visited, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt all still locked in the tensions, and showing some of the wounds, of the Arab Spring. There had been rioting during their visit to Caracas, as anti-Chavez factions tried to stir up as much chaos as possible, before blaming it all on pro-Chavez activists. This was still relatively early in the tour, and they had much trouble ahead of them. The Maldives government tottered shortly before they arrived; riots kicked off in Tajikistan as they were flying there; Nauru erupted into violence; and it briefly looked as though we would have to cancel our trip to Bahrain because of disturbances. They came to Hong Kong shortly after the Occupy Movement had finished its peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations, all finding a unity behind the gentle symbol of a yellow umbrella. Jen’s family were engaged with the upholding of democracy and the constitution in Hong Kong, so the company were inundated with stories of how that movement ignited fresh hope.
So many different revolutions: peaceful ones, bloody ones; ruling classes manoeuvring around each other, underclasses unable to hold the lid on rage any longer; different peoples fighting for tribal supremacy, indoctrinated folk fighting for ideas and ideals; nihilists desperate to spread the emptiness in themselves, zealots desperate to reshape the world’s variety into uniformity; saints fighting for peace and for others, devils fighting for the love of violence and for themselves; the many fighting for the freedom of all: the few fighting for the bondage of the many; and somehow, somehow, against all logic, the few always seeming to win. So many revolutions.
Hamlet fitted in everywhere, Hamlet the icon of restlessness for a world that never seems able to settle. Hamlet who is restless for truth, unable to bear the lie his present moment is built on; who is restless for civility, trying to forge a new care in human engagement; who is restless for honesty and integrity and cannot bear people faking or borrowing their feelings; who is restless for calm when the moment seems a little too noisy, and restless for noise when it seems too calm. In a world that cannot settle, and never has, and most probably never will, what better hero than a hero of restlessness, what better reflection of the world back to itself?
Two notable delusions probably shaped the beginning of the tour. The first that Hamlet is a journey towards peace, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that when he says, ‘the readiness is all. . . Let be’, that he has achieved some sort of nirvana that he was searching for. But Shakespeare was an artist, and artists don’t write journeys; they write truth. Yes, he has found that perspective, but he still has to try to place that perspective in the messy world, and in his own messy humanity. Shortly before saying ‘readiness is all’, he leaves Ophelia’s funeral scene with a curse from the bowels of the underclass, which is just as profound and just as true to his own spirit:
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.
The second delusion, and an embarrassingly huge one, was that touring Hamlet would have some sort of benevolent effect, spread a little world peace, nation talking to nation, etc. Unforgivably grandiose, but true. Shame on us for our stupidity, but you need a small helping of stupidity to launch anything of this size. A few months in, it started to become clear that we were not only failing to spontaneously solve all the problems o
f the world, but that everywhere we went, social and political problems seemed to get worse and more acute. For a while, on top of the embarrassment at the earlier delusion, this caused a little shame. The curse of Hamlet, we started to call it. But perspective shifted, as it tends to with theatre and with life, and all of the unrest and unease started to seem less like a bane, and more like a discreet virtue. Hamlet was not put into the world to settle it into a somatic calm. He was given to us by Shakespeare to engineer a little change. To remind us to stay restless, and to keep pushing forward towards the something or other ahead of us. To keep making all sorts of trouble for an all sorts of world.
* * *
Georgia in the old Soviet Union can seem the most televisually memorialised country on earth. Whether this is a hangover from Soviet surveillance, or simply a desire to proliferate news channels, is moot. At our performance, which closed one of their several theatre festivals, there were five crews interviewing people at the interval, and ten at the end when the show folded into a party. The venue we had performed in was an old helicopter hangar converted with all sorts of urban driftwood and an anarchist sensibility into a chaotic but energised space. It was very Tbilisi, a madcap conjunction of scraps, wit and art that together made something beautiful.
As the show stopped, a heavy-metal band struck up instantaneously, and as I left, the company were all raving away to a blend of thrash metal and psychedelic jazz flute. Beruce, who had snapped his ankle recently in Hong Kong, was waving crutches wildly in the air; Amanda was dancing tall as usual and attracting a circle of devotees around her shifting totem pole. We were joined at the party by the Schaubühne theatre company from Berlin. They were uneasy. Major European theatre stars, their style, led by their theatre-god director Thomas Ostermeier, is a sort of held-back Californian/Teutonic cool, with complex signifiers of status being stitched into every movement. They were taken aback by the guileless innocence of our company, who wandered around being sweetly open with everyone. And more than a little put out that the Georgians didn’t appear to want to play cool-status three-dimensional Connect 4 with them, and had just decided to have fun with our lot. They tried to adjust but awkwardly.
Earlier that evening, I had been drawn in to the most infantile directorial cock-off with Ostermeier. The organiser of the festival, Ekaterina, a local powerhouse and old friend, had brought us together in a cafe, and she and a friend sat and observed the silliness of two directors making fools of themselves. After spending a short time telling me about British politics, Ostermeier started to list the number of Shakespeare shows he had directed. I countered. I talked a little of the Globe, and of the new theatre we had built. He told me he had built a Globe and showed me a picture. My face wrinkled into a ‘not great is it?’ expression. He told me how long his Hamlet had been playing. I conceded, then told him how far and wide mine had gone. He looked a bit puce. He offered up, rather feebly, ‘Mine went to Ramallah.’ ‘Mmm. . . mine is going to Ramallah, and several refugee camps.’ This was becoming one of the least edifying encounters of the whole experience. ‘Are you going to come and see my Hamlet then?’ he asked rather desperately. ‘Might do, might not,’ I said, starting to giggle, because the sheer childishness of this was becoming a pleasure in itself. Eka and her friend started giggling as well. So Ostermeier, who does not seem to see many jokes anywhere, got out his calendar and started listing all the dates it was on in the near future. ‘Nope,’ I said and then, ‘Sorry, busy’ and then, ‘No can do.’ For many, especially those who hang out on theatre comment threads, this man is a living deity, and I a gross vulgarian, so the nature of the encounter gave me a guilty pleasure.
Ekaterina was one of the main reasons I had come to Georgia. She hosted me in 2011, and organised the trip her company, the Marjanishvili, made to our festival in 2012. I have strong feelings for country and city, having spent a month in Tbilisi in 1990, at a time of extreme turbulence. The Georgians had just fought for and attained freedom from the Soviet Union, and were tearing themselves apart in the struggle for post-independence supremacy. Diners were kidnapped from restaurants as we sat there, bombs blew out windows one block behind us and we walked on, murderous single gunshots punctuated the night and we slept on. I befriended a wonderfully blasé CIA man, who sat in one of the few cafes around back then, wearing a cowboy hat and a mammoth belt buckle, and when asked what he was doing said ‘Import export’ with a heavy wink. He was shot dead a couple of years later at a Caucasian border. All the while the Russian tanks gathered on the edge of town. Revolution is one thing, putting together something stable in its place is a different and harder job. Somehow, through some visionary leadership, and through the steadiness and imagination of its people, the Georgians secured their future. My feelings for the country were great, for Eka stronger, and now that I saw her, her head elegantly swathed in a turban, hiding the hair lost to chemotherapy, and heard how tough it had been to organise her festival, my admiration grew.
Theatre politics in Tbilisi is as riven as all its politics – festivals and companies vie with each other, and several of them were still in the rigor mortis grip of those who thrived in the old regime. Eka was of the new generation, and in some ways it seemed like old Cold War battles were still raging here. We talked of my 1990 memories, and she told me of the recent war with Russia, reminding me of the difficulty of imagining alien tanks bearing down on your own city. She railed against the theatre veterans who hated anything new and still craved the old days: ‘They eat us. They eat us alive with their disappointment. All of their, “we used to do this thirty years ago and it was a big success”, and their, “oh how they cried twenty years ago”. . . They eat us alive with their memories and with the past. They want to suck us back into history. They are a tumour which grows within us taking away the future.’ All this from a young woman whose turban had been swept off to reveal stubbly white hair. ‘I cannot remember a single one of my shows. I move on. The future is everything.’
‘But look around you,’ I said to try to cheer her, waving rather hopelessly at a swish hotel foyer, filled with swanky new Western shops. ‘All the money that has come in, all the investment, how different everything is from twenty-five years ago. . .’
‘Maybe the future is more worrying,’ she smiled. ‘Change and revolution takes time and care.’
I rebuked her gently for not having told us earlier about her illness, and told her how much we thought of her. I asked her how the illness had affected her, and her earlier gloom lifted off and away: ‘I feel more clean, more clear, and a thousand useless worries have flown off the top of my head. I have cleared out love. Everything. Now I want to live in a country house with a garden and with many children. It doesn’t matter who the father is. It is stupid and optimistic, but that is all I want now. Children running around in roses.’
There are many different kinds of revolution. As many as there are people.
125 Philippines, Manila
The Tanghalang Aurelio Tolentino
23 August 2015
126 Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby
The Caritas Technical Secondary School
25 August
127 Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan
Jerudong International School
29 August
128 Myanmar, Yangon
The Strand Hotel
31 August
129 China, Hong Kong
Lyric Theatre, Hong Kong Centre for the Performing Arts
4–6 September
130 Singapore, Singapore
Capitol Theatre
8–12 September
13
FIGHTING FOR EGGSHELLS AND REVENGE
Enter FORTINBRAS, a Captain, and Soldiers, marching.
PRINCE FORTINBRAS Go, captain, from me greet the Danish king.
Tell him that Fortinbras nephew to old Norway,
Craves a free pass and conduct over his land,
According to the Articles agreed on.
If that his ma
jesty would aught with us,
We shall express our duty in his eye;
And let him know so.
CAPTAIN I will do’t, my lord.
PRINCE FORTINBRAS Go softly on.
Act 4, Scene 4
THE APPEARANCE OF FORTINBRAS comes almost as a complete surprise. The story is set up at the beginning of the play, there is a brief continuation of it with Voltimand’s embassy to the young prince’s uncle, but amidst the other dramas, it falls out of sight. As with many of Shakespeare’s tragedies, as the play progresses the focus gets tighter: the wide open landscape of the early acts pulls in to the castle, then from its large state rooms to its bedrooms, and then tighter still to its corridors, staircases and cellars. The initial sea-blasted expanse gives way to something close, sticky and claustrophobic. We have burrowed into the dark heart of Elsinore’s power, and the family’s dysfunction.
Then the sky clears, and a host of marching soldiers appear on the stage, led by a new character. It is a major switch of focus, a blast of Nordic air blown into a fetid stable. This is Fortinbras leading his army on an expedition against the Polack. We remember hearing something about this earlier, and parking it somewhere, but are still playing catch-up as the scene moves swiftly along. Our immediate impression of Fortinbras is favourable: he plays according to the rules and is respectful to the Danish King. There is something about ‘Go softly on’ that, though it can be played sinister (and Lord knows people have tried), smacks of a gentle authority. Our impression of Fortinbras remains immediate because he is off almost before he has started talking. Unlike his distorted doppelgänger Hamlet, he is clearly not given to hanging around and pondering. Hamlet, having glimpsed him, calls him a ‘delicate and tender prince’, and though directors are always looking for ways to distort Hamlet’s tone, by and large he is a trustworthy witness.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 23