In some ways this was the last hurrah for a whole way of being; it was, as James Shapiro has beautifully described in 1599, the death of chivalry. Shakespeare, his antennae as ever attuned to surfaces and subtexts, was registering the movement of tectonic plates grinding inexorably against each other below the surface. Hamlet is born at the moment that one world was giving way to another. As the play was forming in Shakespeare’s mind, in the Founder’s Hall in London a group of merchants were coming together to form the East India Company. They refused to engage any knight adventurers in their first expeditions. This was a new class, the merchant, with new ambitions, and a different way of going about them. Hamlet was born as chivalry was flailing its last histrionic limbs (the Ghost is in many ways the emblem and the echo of that chivalry) before giving way to a new world of trade and globalisation. The next time the English went back to Ireland, they did not go to put on a glorious show; they went to kill. Hamlet sits in the intersection of these two moments, as a deep and quiet revolution churned beneath the earth.
It often seems that some illusory glamour and chivalry has returned to murderous warfare in the age of the fractured nation state, or the even smaller polity. This may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare has seemed so newly fresh over the last twenty years. The separatists in eastern Ukraine, with the assistance of a churning media machine, love a bit of the self-mythification these small dirty wars allow. With the return of warlords in the factional fighting in Central Africa, in the Balkans where football hooligans like Arkan restyled themselves as Chief Psychopaths, in Afghanistan, or now in the swirls of influence within Syria, you can see in the way that armies dress, and memorialise themselves in selfies and social-media profiles, the return of the desperate styling in death that was part of the chivalric code. It was flattened out of existence in the age of the Cold War and the faceless modern mega-army, but now it has returned with a flourish. IS are the masters of self-styling as glamorous warriors, lolling in their jeeps, kaffiyehs draped across them, and great sweeping horizons behind. All memory of their previous life sniffing glue in Cardiff bus stops, or stealing from grannies in Le Havre, is left behind them. It is a horrible con of both the world and themselves. They are trying to paint a picture of freely impelled individuals following the passion of their hearts. When in fact they are as closely controlled as any army, Saddam’s old Republican Guard thugs transferring the expertise they gathered running a terror state in Iraq into a different arena.
Essex’s foolhardy romance of warfare, and the murderousness of the realpolitik which took the tide against him, both hover in the background of the play. Fortinbras is an enclosed, mysterious figure, praised by Hamlet. We see his short walk-through in the section above, then he appears briefly at the end and does a capable job of tidying up a horrible mess. In that brief scene they share, we see a shift in Hamlet and a new understanding of how romance and realpolitik walk together. We see a man who realises that all forms of human achievement are chasing feathers in the wind, but accepts that that is what humanity does and is – an animal chasing feathers in the wind. Hamlet now knows that the world is a vain fiction, and that action is a sort of tricked-out nothing, and since it is so, his failure to do anything thus far bothers him no longer. Now, to our disappointment, since he has seen through the trick of it, he can do it. Now, to our sadness, he is ready to join in the game. And ready to complete his mission of revenge.
* * *
Revenge has sat alongside the play like an unwelcome and heavy guest for 400 years. There is no argument that the revenge play was a form, and that Shakespeare was writing within that form and in response to that form. Revenge plays were great box office. The clearly identified superobjective for the leading character and many of the subsidiary ones served as a strong thread to pull a play together. The promised bloodbath at the end kept the audience standing, or sitting on rough benches, eagerly looking forward to the inevitable pile-up of corpses.
The previous Hamlet play, which played with some success to Elizabethan audiences before Shakespeare set to improving it, seems to have leant heavily on its revenge theme. From the little we can guess at of this play, whose text has been buried by posterity, and from our knowledge of other contemporary revenge dramas, they seem to have leant heavily on extreme emotional states, highly burnished charnel-house language, plenty of plotting, and no shortage of hysterical cackling as characters left the stage.
This is the form that Shakespeare was simultaneously working within and running away from. I had always been inclined, when approaching the play, to join him in running away from it. Shakespeare exploded the form, not because he sat at home studying a whole collection of them, carefully working out how to deconstruct and reconstruct the genre’s genetic code, but simply because he took one look at the story and fancied a bit of that. He saw in the format a good portmanteau to carry his own baggage – stuff about fathers and sons, about clashing sensibilities, about identity and madness, about life’s purpose or lack of it, about the theatre and its uses and abuses, about love and its disappointments. He spotted a loose format which he knew could provoke in himself the swirl of the best creation. The place where life and art can meet and dance in patterns which seem natural and true.
Some structures can spark great writing and deliver lethal stories, but the architecture of their narratives are too linear and too strict to allow the ultimate freedoms. Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Comedy of Errors are all in different ways great, but you always know where you are within the story. You land in a town and you know the layout and the grid. That can be and is reassuring. But there are other structures, where a seemingly lucid and clear beginning carries on to a certain point and then gives way to something stranger and more dreamlike. You lose your way, and happily; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest and Hamlet all share this quality. With A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is often hard to remember even in the middle of deep acquaintance which scene follows which; something of the forest’s bewitching miasma becomes general. In Lear, the scenes on the heath and within the King’s slipped wits are meant to bamboozle, and they succeed. Love’s Labour’s Lost is just delightfully silly. A similar deliberate swirling aimlessness takes over in the middle of Hamlet, the long section where we circle round the endless corridors of the castle. A play which begins so full of purpose – ‘Revenge!’, ‘Yes, I will!’ – slips out of its own straight lines and gets excitingly loopy. Language and character, feeling and thought, trump plot or structure, and we all float together on strange seas.
Some have seen this as the deliberate pouring of fresh stuff into the revenge mould; I think Shakespeare just saw a well-sprung diving board, which he could bounce on a few times and then float somewhere dynamically other. Within that freedom, the moral issues around revenge or no revenge diminish in importance, and the play becomes about something more mysterious and more important than a Brechtian parable on ethical choice. Up to a point, probably up to the beginning of Act 2, there is an infrastructure, but then it melts away. To see what follows as a collection of deliberate intentions and formal games is to diminish what Shakespeare is doing.
We are not watching an intellectual construct, we are watching a light, the light of a young life, and a very bright one. We watch that bright light flicker, and then fade, and then die. Having now witnessed it with captivated audiences all over the world, many of whom did not understand a single one of the words, that is what keeps people drawn in. Not the choices about revenge. It is great when we get to the last act, and we know there is going to be some tying up of loose ends and a little meting out of justice. It’s a reliable moment to observe the quickening of interest in the room as the audience smells first danger, then fighting, then death. But after the strange beauty of what has gone before, it feels like a lessening. If you don’t know the words, don’t you just watch a boy burn and all the more brightly with the foreknowledge that he will die? And that burning, taper-light against a dark wo
rld, isn’t that the spectacle?
* * *
We had spoken much of revenge and its meaning through the course of putting the show together, and through our movement around the world. There were always moments on our travels which brought the company up short, moments when the reality of a line would suddenly become apparent. The company talked of a sudden silence which fell in Bosnia after Horatio said, ‘Put the bodies in the market place’, in a country that remembered all too vividly the sight of bodies in the market place. In Rwanda, the completeness of their understanding of mortality, and of bodies buried badly, came home all the more forcefully. The knowledge filled the air and changed the gravity of the thought. It was late in the tour before we came face to face with revenge.
We were in Erbil in northern Iraq, in the Kurdish region. It was one of the toughest gigs of the whole tour and madly security conscious. When I arrived at the hotel at four in the morning, each door of the car was opened simultaneously by a masked man with a machine gun, and a dog gave me a good thorough sniffing to check for explosives. Only thirty kilometres away was Mosul, a city entirely run by IS. As in Somaliland, and as in so many other places, we were the first cultural visitors in aeons, and the world and his wife gathered the next day to watch the show. But the day before, the company had been taken to a refugee camp to meet those displaced by the invasion of IS. One man was eager to tell his story, he had been shot in the hip, and he told us of the fighting. He was steady and measured, his translator was imperfect and excitable, but I give the translator’s words here verbatim:
After Mosul collapse, ISIS, after they control Mosul, he kill and he hang eleven member of my family. . . my brother, my brother and all his sons be killed, be hanged by ISIS. . . my brother he was handicapped, he was on wheelchair, when they hang him. . . even the friend of my son’s they kill him, they hang him, my son’s friends. . .
All the houses that belong to me they destroy, demolish. . . and even, they cut even the wood, the trees, and after they say allahu akbar. . .
When we say human rights, they telling you be better than ISIS, an animal could be better than ISIS, there is no description for ISIS. . . and after I am taking my revenge, the human rights come to me and they say. . . oh you should stop, not revenge. . . what kind of human rights if they say do not revenge against the beast, against the criminals. . . I am telling you they are not human beings.
Dead hole, the hole of death, he was in wheelchair, and they push him in and he die. . .
(pointing to someone)
They kill his father and his mother front of his eye, now he is stammering and stuttering, front of his eye, naked. . .
(pointing to another)
Everything start from the zero point. . . They exploit sick people and vulnerable people. . . Islam is the religion of justice and peace. . . to deface or stigmatise the religion of Islam to make it ugly and nasty. . . my neighbour was a Sunni, I did not know, my manager was a Christian, it was not a problem, never a problem. . . there is something behind the scene, there is some hand behind the scene did that, I don’t know what happened. . . Is there any religion on earth asking people to rape, to take money from people. . .?
They have new techniques of killing, new ways of degrading people, new ways to killing human. . . I curse that religion, if any religion do that I curse them, I damn them if it is a way of destroying the human.
Someone asked, ‘How do you look forward from here?’
I am very optimistic because they will be banished, they will be killed, now all the people who is ISIS we can determine who they are, so there will be no place for them. . .
There was something raw and naked and unmediated about the wound here, and about the desire to avenge it, which lived in a world – reality – entirely separate from the fiction of our play. Naked hurt, naked rage. A trace of it pulses through Hamlet’s raw scream ‘O vengeance’, and through Fortinbras’s desire to gain retribution for the loss suffered by his father. There was much of it that we discovered still alive in the world, the people of Russia and of Ukraine still feeling the pain of wounds that were fresh, and wanting to lash out to alleviate that pain; the chaos that was left behind in the world after the USA felt the need to gain atonement in blood for the wound they suffered on 9/11; conflicts, local, regional and international, where the pain of loss could only be solved and dissolved by inflicting more pain and more loss on others. It often felt, as we travelled from country to country, that we were in a world filled with hatred, a world without forgiveness, and with an unslakable thirst to honour historic promises of vengeance.
Hamlet speaks directly and simply to that world, and that is little but saddening. The world of forgiveness and healing and reconciliation which Shakespeare mapped out in his late plays is infinitely generous and touching. I’m not sure we have made the world to suit those plays yet.
* * *
Like Fortinbras and his army passing through a country and moving on, chasing a bit of honour, we went from country to country asking for permission to play, then passing on. There was an element of ‘fantasy and trick of fame’ about what we were doing, but we were not aiming to win any small patches of ground or to gain anything for keeps. We merely wanted to leave a story floating in the air of a country, lingering in some memories, and maybe staining the earth a little. We hoped Hamlet, with its doubt, its confusions and its questions, would persuade a few to let the eggshells be.
131 Azerbaijan, Baku
State National Academic Drama Theatre
3 October 2015
132 Georgia, Tbilisi
Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre
5 October
133 Armenia, Yerevan
Stanislavski Russian Theatre
8 October
134 United Arab Emirates, Dubai
DUCTAC Theatre
10–11 October
135 Nepal, Kathmandu
Bhaktapur Durbar Square
13 October
136 Bhutan, Thimphu
Auditorium Courtyard of the Royal
University of Bhutan
16 October
137 India, Bengaluru
Ranga Shankara Theatre
18–19 October
138 Oman, Muscat
Ministry of Education Auditorium
22 October
139 Jordan, Amman
Odeon Amphitheatre
24 October
140 Syria (Jordan), Zaatari
Zaatari Refugee Camp
25 October
141 Palestine, Ramallah
Ramallah Cultural Palace
27 October
14
MISSION CONTROL
HORATIO Let there a scaffold be reared up in the market place, And let the State of the world be there.
Act 5, Scene 2
FOR OUR GLOBE TO GLOBE festival in 2012, our carpenters built a daft but fun wooden structure, a signpost pointing crazily in thirty-seven different directions to each of the capital cities of the countries visiting us. Knocked up as a gift, we placed it on the piazza outside the Globe. It became iconic in the course of the six weeks of the festival, companies and audiences standing around it, laughing and contemplating. Stuck in Istanbul for the day, I was standing in front of the Milion stone, the last remaining fragment of a once domed edifice erected in the fourth century AD in what was then Constantinople. This was the Byzantine zero-point, the place from which all distances to far-flung corners of its empire were measured, and were pointed to. It was a reminder of the internationalist tradition we stood within, though happily we were less concerned with trade and conquest by the sword.
Having missed a connection to join the company in the Far East, I was gorging on a fast feast of iconic sights before catching the next plane out. The Blue Mosque, started a few years after the first performance of Hamlet and topped off in the year Shakespeare died, squatted like a fat Buddha, happy in its own bulk, spreading out ripples of meditative fat. It was under reconstruction, so flights
of scaffolding climbed up inside. The colouring within was a cooling breeze, a patchwork of duck-egg blues and greying reds, with a dance of old script running through it. Traces of ferny leaves snaked through the other colours, looking very like Elizabethan fabrics. A busy cluster of visitors was corralled in a crowded section to lift their phones and take hasty pictures of the devout at prayer, who had all the room in the world.
I charged across to the monumental Hagia Sophia, built in AD 537, which had a clean 1,000-year run as the largest religious edifice in the world and is still far, far too big for common sense. The baffling conundrum of how they got to the top to squeeze in the last brick was partly answered by half of it being occluded by a forest of scaffolding, since it, too, was undergoing refurbishment. After the watery colours of the Blue Mosque, here was a vivid colour contrast, with a rusty brick and the yellow and orange echo of Roman sensibility in the traces of paint that remained. It left an impression of peace and of a mango sweetness. Scratchy graceless birds flitted across the upper reaches of the topmost dome.
Amongst the graffiti, there was a line of Viking script scraped into the stone in the ninth century by a guard called Halvdan, who thus ensured his grip on posterity. This reminded me of the journey we had come, including Scandinavia and Kiev, and the chains of rivers which connect north to south. Although we like to segment our history into tribes and factions, borders and boundaries have been porous since people’s first curiosity sent them off in search of different-tasting cheese. To be honest, the Hagia Sophia was something of a mess – low-hanging chandeliers, and anachronistic galleries, and the warring aesthetics of clashing cultures all contrived to detract from its monumental simplicity – but the breath of Byzantium had been somehow frozen within it, with all the promise of imaginative richness that word offers.
Only a couple of weeks later, I was similarly stranded in Istanbul’s old wrestling opponent, Athens, again on Hamlet business, and again frustrated by the vicissitudes of airplane travel. I had been in and out of Greece many times but had never spent time in the centre of Athens doing the classical dance, so I grasped the opportunity. Having been a classical student of almost unique poorness, my reactions to the evidence of the civilisation I should have studied were complex. My aesthetic sense was awakened by the grace of all on display – ‘Great pot’, etc. – but I couldn’t help feeling my response should have been better informed. I spent a lot of time admiring the quality of the pleats on much of the statuary, and how they fell across the body in a way to make even the most broken fragments still strangely erotic, but I was ashamed of my ignorance as to which goddess was which. This awkwardness was only compounded when I got to the top of the Acropolis and a Greek guide was winning multiple brownie points with a group of Americans by telling them how evil the British were for stealing their Elgin Marbles. I skulked back a little. But the experience of the Acropolis was again compromised by the same factor which affected the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia: a huge quantity of obscuring scaffolding. Having had my third experience of antiquity obscured in a short while, I started to think about scaffolding.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 25