There is hardly a building of stature anywhere in the world that we stand and gawp at now, that was not previously encased in a prior edifice of equally awesome scaffolding. Whether the Parthenon or the Blue Mosque or the Taj Mahal, before the building was there it had to have a shadow state, or an outer mask – its scaffolding – upon which thousands and tens of thousands of artists and artisans, great armies of muscle and finesse, laboured to create that building. Only for the scaffolding to be torn away so that the building could stand clean and new born, pretending like an ingrate that the scaffolding, which allowed its creation, was never there. Those thoughts passing through me, I felt a ludicrous flush of sympathy for scaffolding, poor neglected, forgotten scaffolding. The Parthenon stands there all perfectly proportioned, the Hagia Sophia all outlandishly monumental, the Taj Mahal all gleamingly pink at dawn, as if they had just appeared out of nowhere, incapable of paying respect to what first made them. Until repairs are needed, and they all scream ‘Scaffolding!’, like spoilt children, and await the return of their supportive parent. Scaffolding is the midwife of every building great and small, and brings it into the world. It has to hug the building close, clinging to it to keep it steady, before tearing itself away to leave the building to stand on its own feet. It is the mother of all edifices.
Plays appear on stages attempting (not always succeeding) to look like life new born, existence occurring in front of you. Whether kitchen-sink realism, drawing-room mystery, Greek tragedy or Hamlet wandering around Elsinore, the actors have to walk onto the stage as if they have arrived in that moment. They cannot show the long months, then intense weeks, then hyper-intense hours of care and construction which go into their attempt to look effortless. That is true for all theatre. For a tour, you add in multiple variables: transport of people, of set and props, accommodation and dealing with all the technical particularities of each venue. When you’re touring abroad, you have to factor in further extras, from visas and licenses, to translation, security and the vagaries of air travel.
Yet you must ensure that the actors can wander onto the stage as well-equipped as possible and look as if they have not a care in the world. You have to set in place a complex system of scaffolding which can be detached with ease and leave the show gleaming. Or, if not gleaming, at least upright. Somehow, somehow, and it remains a mystery to us how it was managed, over the course of two years, and through almost 200 countries, and doing 280 odd performances, we never missed a single show. We turned up on stage at the given moment and started with a song in almost every country in the world. At the Vatican, after a delayed flight and then a broken bus, the actors had to walk straight off the bus and onto the stage. Cancelled flights between Guinea–Bissau and the Gambia meant not all the actors could fly, so two of them and two stage managers had to cross the country in a commandeered hearse. In Pacific islands, where the attitude to air travel and time-keeping is relaxed to put it mildly, feet had to be stamped to ensure that planes left at the right time and headed for the right destination.
At the sharp end of most of the construction and the care were the four stage managers who travelled every leg of the journey: Dave McEvoy, Becky Austin, Adam Moore and Carrie Burnham. Their resilience, consistency and steadiness were sufficient for them to have constructed several Taj Mahals, and a Machu Picchu to boot. Every airport, and there were several hundred, was an event in itself. As a precaution, the start of every journey was timed to give several hours’ leeway. This was sensible, though it proved a form of slow water-torture in practice. As well as the disorientation of swapping time zones, almost every other day started between three and five in the morning. The company would arrive, usually zombie-like with exhaustion, a vivid shamble of tired bones dressed in bright chilled-out fabrics, loose trousers and shabby T-shirts in razzle-dazzle colours. As they were a handsome bunch, this proved something of a technicolour spectacle in itself.
After disembarking their bus, all – silent, still half-asleep and running on autopilot – would head straight to the accompanying truck. From this everyone would lift the sixteen hefty flight cases. These formed our set wherever we went, and carried everything needed for the show, including costumes, props, canvas flats, steel uprights, swords and a couple of skulls. Then a caravan of trolleys, bearing the flight cases and personal bags, would move through the sleek architecture, or across the crumbled yard, or through the wooden sheds, of all the airports of the world. A colourful caravan, it would attract no small amount of attention. Once at check-in, Becky or Dave would go to the front, and with courtesy and firmness, and with little or no knowledge of the appropriate language, explain that they were checking in enough cases for a small army. They developed a confidence and a calm at handling this that never ceased to astonish, and behind them the patience of the actors – chatting, listening to music, reading, watching the world bustle in transit – was Zen-like. Somehow bags and bones would all get on to the plane together.
Once delivered to the new country, the bags would be lifted from luggage carousels and trolleyed up again. There would be a brief excursion to sort out local currency, or shbibli. This is what the company renamed the currencies of all the world. Since they were moving at such speed and couldn’t learn the name of each individual currency, they would simply go to the bureau de change at each new outpost, pass over the currency they had, and say, ‘Can I have some shbibli, please?’ Amazingly, it never failed. Passing through immigration and customs was again a matter of confidence and bluff. Cases often had to be opened, and swords explained, but what surprised on the journeys I took with them was how accommodating officialdom was. Once it was explained who we were and what we were doing, doors usually opened. ‘Ah, theatre!’, ‘Ah, Hamlet!’, ‘Ah, Globe!’, usually accompanied by some baffled smiling then enjoyment at joining in. Theatre can prove the ultimate passport – there is something perennially innocent about it. Bergman’s medieval films feature touring companies, scruffy bundles of life fizzing out vitality around horse-drawn carts as they move through the Nordic landscape, small Tazzes of energy in the enveloping gloom. I thought of them as I saw our company moving through airports, the same anarchic buzz of humour and life. Our tour, by nature of its patent insanity, promoted yet more goodwill.
Out of the airport, and our local fixer/promoter/friend met, the cases were loaded onto new trucks and taken straight to the theatre, or the place we were turning into a theatre. That day or the next, the stage managers would go in ahead of the actors, build the set from what was in the cases, create whatever rudimentary lighting was possible, unpack costumes and set them on racks, and set out the props on whatever tables could be managed. All this while dealing with backstage crews and theatre managements of all nationalities. The show was no rest for them, since they had to manage it, to play musical instruments (some of them), act a little (some of them), and do what minimal shifting of minimal scenery there was. And then the instant that the show came down, almost before the applause had finished, they began dismantling the set and packing it away. This was all hands on deck – actors (some of them), stage management and anyone around helping out. I prided myself on my limited ability with a power tool and was always first in with the Nikita to unscrew what bolts there were. The sight of me bending over with a tool in hand being generally useless made it hard for our hosts to believe that I was the artistic director. There was something determinedly and pleasingly collective about this dismantling and packing together. I once showed the egregious Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, around the Globe after a performance, and he was astonished to see the actors packing up the set. ‘But, you’ve just been on stage doing all that acting! You can’t be doing this as well!’ he blustered. His inability to comprehend such collectivism was its own reward. Once packed, the cases were carried out by everyone to whatever truck or coach was waiting, ready for the trip to the airport and for the whole cycle to begin again.
That routine of swirling through a city and pausing briefly to drop off a Hamlet pe
rformance was repeated more than 200 times in a bewildering variety of settings. The stage managers would whip the scaffolding instantly into place to hold the show, and then make it disappear again with a conjuror’s speed, so that the set, or in many cases the newly built theatre, were ready for the actors to go out and tell their story for the hundredth time, as if for the first time. On top of that was no shortage of pastoral care, and occasionally health care, and some tour guide activity to boot. It sounds an unromantic compliment to compare the stage managers to scaffolding, but without it there would have been no Taj Mahal, no Blue Mosque, no Parthenon. And no Hamlet.
* * *
In any good space movie, the tropes of climax and danger are familiar: docking procedures going wrong, the oxygen tanks running low, the astronaut preparing to sacrifice himself for the good of the others. But what always sneaks under the wire, and engages us without us being fully aware, is the drama on the ground: mission control and its inhabitants, where men (and it is usually men) with buzz haircuts and short-sleeved shirts and underarm sweat patches stay up night after night listening to and observing the endangered rocket, trying to come up with any solution that might save it, asserting grimly that ‘Failure is not an option’ and that nothing will go down on their watch. There is a romance to their teamwork, their ethic and their determination, that I have always loved. The fragility of the real moon expeditions, an easily buckled tin can hurled out into the infinite loneliness of space, served as a metaphor for ourselves and all our fragile journeys, and for much of what is best in us. Mad dreaming, daft courage, insatiable curiosity and a foolish hope that good may come from it. And behind it the hard work, the optimism and the unshakable loyalty of teams of people. What have we achieved that is better than that?
Mission control for our expedition was based in our office on Bankside. Everyone contributed to it, but as a department we had much else to do – opening a new theatre, doing other tours, making a series of films and mounting a string of productions in our (now) two theatres – so most of the work devolved to a team of five people: our executive producer, Tom Bird; three producers, Tamsin Mehta, Malú Ansaldo and Claire Godden; and one marketing associate, Helena Miscioscia, whose task was to raise audiences everywhere from Auckland to Santiago. Buzz cuts, short sleeves and sweat patches were in short supply, but there was no dearth of hard work, optimism and loyalty.
Visas were probably the biggest task and the biggest expense. The company each worked their way through eight passports, stuffed with stamps and forms. They would always have one passport with them on the road and another in London being carted round from embassy to embassy. Often we had to travel to other cities – Dublin or Paris – because the embassies in those countries were better equipped to deal with our requests. The weight of form-filling would have defeated the bureaucracies of many a small corporation, but it was achieved by three or four people. Individuals were often stuck at desks from dawn to dusk, checking and rechecking visa applications for fear that a minor detail might be wrong; none ever was. Brinkmanship was often required. Nigeria held out for an absurdly large amount of money for entry, quite justifiably aggravated by what the British Home Office charged Nigerians who wanted to visit the UK. Bhutan was similarly expensive, until we went to perform there, and the King announced himself so pleased that he was going to pay for all the visas himself.
Contact had to be made with host venues and promoters, and dates secured. This could stretch nerves to an attenuated point. In the majority of countries, dates were made long in advance with national theatres and established local promoters, and all proceeded in a grown-up manner. In many, there was no such infrastructure in place. In several cases, I would ask where we were going to play in a country a week before we arrived, and my question would be met with nervous smiles and hopeful assurances. No matter, I thought blithely, things would sort themselves out. How? No idea. ‘It’s a mystery’, as the character Henslowe says in Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love. With their usual mysterious propitiousness, things did sort themselves out. We ran closest to the wire when we flew into an island in the morning while still not entirely sure where we would be playing in the evening, but a hut was secured and the show went on.
Even more surprising was how everywhere the ticket became hot. No matter how late the show was announced, it was almost always full to bursting. Shakespeare obviously sells, Hamlet too, and the Globe has a cachet, but it was the madness of the endeavour that people bought into. One example of a general enthusiasm was Algeria. This was another late announcement, with the show in their national theatre only going on sale three or four days before we were to play. Tickets went within hours, and on the night an extra thousand people showed up. More chairs were put out, and audiences packed into the aisles, but six or seven hundred were left outside. They got angry and started banging on the outside doors demanding admittance. The noise was too great for the show to start. Tamsin stood watching it from the theatre’s balcony with the theatre’s managers. They turned to her.
‘What are you going to do?’ they asked.
‘Well, it’s your theatre, you should do something,’ said Tamsin, who is from Birmingham and is a long way beyond ‘no’ in the lacking of nonsense department.
‘You must go out and speak to them and tell them to go home,’ they persisted.
‘I don’t know the language; you talk to them.’
‘But you are blondes, and they will believe you!’
There was no effective rejoinder to that, so Tamsin went out on her own and spoke to the crowd, and they melted off into the night. It was an excitement repeated elsewhere. I saw riot police out in Quito and Lima to control the crowds. The flipside was a handful of dates where only thirty or forty people showed up. Wittenberg in Germany, which we had felt compelled to do because of its resonance, was a rather disappointing crowd in the town’s old disco (what would Luther have thought?); a couple of the Pacific Islands showed a valiant lack of interest; and the Francophone countries of West Africa showed a touching loyalty to their old colonial masters by miming ‘Ooo, Shaksperrr? Bof!’ with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders. When this happened, it was the company’s responsibility to keep their energy high, and mission control’s job to keep morale up.
From the centre, we had to book all travel (trying to juggle cost with reliability); to book accommodation (trying to juggle cost with comfort, which in some places could have been demarcated with 1 to 5 cockroaches rather than stars); to make sure that each trip was tightly scheduled; to monitor insurance; to monitor health, which meant that in many of the weeks of rest back at home, the company had to troop to rare-disease clinics to get immunised; to liaise with the local government bodies to see how they might help; to try to cut deals wherever we could which might reduce costs; and to see if anybody, but anybody would put their hands in their pockets and defray the expenses. All that and a thousand other things at a rate of roughly three countries a week for two years.
Publicity was a mixture of a pleasure and a trial. The pleasure was the enthusiasm with which much of the world’s media caught on to the idea and played merrily with it, using it as a platform to discuss Shakespeare and Hamlet, and the cultural history of their own country’s interaction with both. The dullness was the manner in which the British media either didn’t get it, or tried to take snarky potshots at it, shooting arrows of the ‘why-aren’t-there-more-balloons-in-it?’ kind from the culturally complacent left, and ‘where-oh-where-is-the-money-for-all-this-culture-malarkey-coming-from?’ kind from the right. The Sun did a rather underwhelming front-page exposé of how we were wasting government money, when, unbeknownst to us, about £4,000 had been given to an educational programme in Haiti, and towards the end of the tour the usual pressure groups tried to orchestrate a shaming of us for going to Israel. We soldiered on. Sometimes you wonder how anything gets made in or gets out of England, though if you can squeeze anything past our old media, and our new trial-by-social-networking culture, it is a triumph of suf
ficient robustness that you are proofed against further challenges.
Raising money remained a problem throughout, but happily we enjoyed the subsidy which came, as it always does, in the form of the endless hours given by those working on it – our mission control. Each got to go out and join the tour here and there, and each would return energised, yet also heartbroken that they had to return and could not run away with the circus. The rewards in London were disconnected ones, since we were so far from the endeavour, but they were still substantial. We would gather around photographs of crowds massing to see the show in extraordinary settings – Pacific and Indian and Mediterranean seas behind them as the sun went down; we would watch phone-films of crowds on the sand in deserts clapping along to the jig, or of Tommy teaching a school full of children in Nigeria how to dance it; we would all share long press stories plastered with photos about the effect of the show, pass emails of gratitude from our co-promoters to each other, and take pleasure collectively in the tweets and Facebook posts of those who had seen it. The company would send a postcard from each country back to the office, which would sit on our communal table, a pleasingly antique method of staying in touch. It was not the same as being there, but it was enough.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 26