And somehow knowing the show was out there, out in its lonely and far-flung places, doing its Hamlet thing, was its own reward. To have asked for or wanted more would have been to miss the point. It was not a show or an experience built around what people could take back from it; it was about what they gave. We never defined why we were doing it. Such definitions almost always disappoint, and they have much less authority than silence. And being able to look at each other and know why.
142 Tajikistan, Dushanbe
Ayni Opera and Ballet Theatre
1 November 2015
143 Uzbekistan, Tashkent
Uzbek National Academic Drama Theatre
4 November
144 Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek
Kyrgyz State National Academic Drama Theatre
7 November
145 Turkey, Istanbul
Zorlu Center for the Performing Arts
10–11 November
146 Turkmenistan, Ashgabat
Alp Arslan Theatre
14 November
15
FRIENDSHIP ON THE ROAD
HAMLET Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. . .
Act 3, Scene 2
THE WORDS FLEA MARKET DIDN’T encompass what was opposite our hotel in Bogotá. Thirty stalls packed into an open yard, it was a riot of stuff, a jamboree of junk, a visual poem of the discarded. On one rather sparse table, there was a small wooden chest, a Bakelite telephone, three pairs of spectacles, a tiara, two old Aztec masks (one gold, one green), and in pride of place, a television remote control. Another table had nothing but inch-thin tall wooden Giacometti figures of either an angry beardy Jesus, or Mary with an infant Jesus bursting Alien-style from her midriff. Another had a swarm of coloured beads swirling across it, bands of colour clashing and colliding like a Rothko. Another had refined crockery beside samurai swords. Another sported old Mayan ceramics against Walt Disney plastic figurines. One table was peopled by 400 tiny dolls all doing unspeakable sexual things to each other in a great miniature plastic orgy. My favourite table had at the back a line of sentimental porcelain madonnas, and laid in front of each, as if in supplication, an old clay dildo.
All these odds and ends of recent history were arranged with precise care, however lowly the content. I watched one stall holder turning and re-turning an old hammer for five minutes, shifting it millimetres this way and that to make sure it sat within the chaos in the right manner. These poems of cluttered jumble were stacked with the artisan care of a Normandy log pile. The result was a dazzle of contrast and colour, all the baroque excess of Catholic decor jostling with a more ancient exuberance. Like a García Márquez novel stacked into each small space, you read a teeming profusion of narratives. You needed to take cocaine to calm yourself down. On another stall, a crude puppet theatre sat beside an old sewing machine and a smart new printer. The words above the theatre ran ‘Nuestro teatro tiene vida’ – our theatre holds life. You could have said the same for the whole market.
García Márquez was beyond ubiquitous in Colombia. His photo greeted you at the airport, our hotel was wallpapered with pictures of him meeting famous men, and quotes from him were plastered everywhere, lending validation to everything, whether a political movement or a cup of coffee. I even spotted a cupcake with his teddy-bear face on it. There was a cultural centre dedicated to him, but in many ways the whole of Bogotá seemed his cultural centre. Just as with the market, the life of the city resembled an outcrop of his teeming imagination, narratives spilling from every corner, each über-narrative birthing four minor narratives within itself. The spirit life, the political life and the life of the heart fight for space with a hectoring clamour on the streets, as in his novels.
Beyond the market, Bogotá was in festival mood, the main drag taken over for a holiday. The vivacity and variety of the market found its complement in the human behaviour out on the streets. Every fifty yards, a section of the road was claimed by a street-dancing group, the best of them defying logic and biology, swiftly creating new shapes of body art to a hip-hop beat and then whisking them away with a conjuror’s lightness of gesture. Glass-blowers torched new shapes on the pavements. Avuncular old men leered their way up to me with a dirty chuckle and opened out folds of paper to reveal bright-blue rhomboid ‘viagra’ pills. Music pumped out of everywhere – tannoys, bands, lonely accordions, impromptu choirs. Keith and I met and spent a brief five minutes betting on a guinea-pig race in the centre of the road. Respectfully hushed crowds surrounded street chess, bright-eyed boys taking on grizzled masters – intellectuals, hustlers and tramps all sharing their fascination with the game. An anarchist collective folk band played some mean jazz up a side street. Small-time gangsters wandered around with Cerberus-like clusters of pit bulls. A thin man sat on a pile of broken glass, then stood up and did a little dance on it as he took a long knife and stuck it up his nose. Everyone was contributing: it was a fully shared theatre. One girl I saw, who had nothing better to contribute, sat rather forlornly by the side of the road, running a knife up and down a cheese grater just so she could join in. To cap it all, in the large square outside the presidential palace, with toy soldiers doing half-hearted synchronised marching in the background, an ancient transvestite importuned me to have a ride on a midget llama. And it felt normal. I was a long way from home.
As with the market, it felt like a holiday from hierarchy. No one was worrying about value, no one was saying this is more important than that. Madonna and dildo sat happily side by side, professor and punk played chess together, ghetto blaster shared the soundscape with sorrowing violin. Everything was out on the street together, and everything coexisted at the same time. This reminded me of the essence of García Márquez’s magic realism: it is not just that there are so many different jostling dimensions and realities in the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is that they are all equally important, they are all on the level.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ sounds a ponderous line in isolation. A patronising lecture by clever-clogs Hamlet to his dull friend. It has a whiff of superiority when frequently quoted, the mystic man who has seen stuff, talking down to his less visionary companion. This is all wrong. It is an urgent and excited plea from the heart. Hamlet has just seen a ghost, the ghost of his father. Reality has just opened a new portal. Possibilities have multiplied. Horatio is shrinking from it: ‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!’ he says, filled with foreboding. Hamlet snaps back at him in an instant one of the central lines to the whole play: ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.’ My instinct for this line was always the same: flush a rage into the first two words, then take a beat, breathe the anger out of yourself, and walk gently through the rest of the line. ‘As a stranger give it welcome’ is central to the new civility, the new openness that Hamlet (and for my money Shakespeare) was trying to live. If something is new or strange or foreign or different, don’t walk away from it, or fear it, or shun it; give it welcome. The ‘more things in heaven and earth’ (and isn’t that ‘thing’ another of Shakespeare’s delicious vaguenesses?) are there to be delighted and excited by. He is not saying I know more than you; he is saying take it in, take it all in. It thrills.
The company became adept at diving into a city and accepting the ‘more things’ they found. They moved at speed, often with only three or four hours to scope out a town, and their skill at covering monuments, street food, dangerous corners and public squares was impressive. Their searches were rather like the experience of shows by the Punchdrunk theatre company, unmapped and unplanned immersive events staged within a space, where your instinct tells you which stories to follow and which to leave. As with a Punchdrunk show, a willing passivity is often better than a planned attack. The amount of information and joy our company could glean from a new city was huge. The
freedom to slip down this alleyway, to follow that crowd, to settle in this meaningless space was limitless and as close to pure joy as I have known.
Before travelling to South America, I had a long chat with one of my daughters, who had just finished Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Her fresh-as-a-daisy enchantment with that book, with its sugar-rush thrill at the excitement of being alive, in the moment and on the move, reminded me of my own infatuation at the same age. And of my desire to live like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, to keep searching for the new, and ‘digging’ as much as I was able. The sharpness of the Kerouac connection was brought home one evening in Quito. We had just done a good show to a vociferously happy crowd, and sped off to a jazz club. Many of the customers there had seen the show and happily brought us into their midst. An outfit of experimental jazzers came out and started noodling and nurdling. A modest outfit – trumpeter, clarinettist, bongo drums and keyboards – but no modest talent. There is something about the best jazz, the easy aimlessness to begin with, the lack of destination, the trace of a melody elsewhere, the swaying earthed sashay of it, then the bursts of virtuosity, the slides and slips of the harmonics, and then at a certain moment the sense that the whole crowd have been scooped up en masse into the adventure of an improvisation, that all are trying to go collectively to strange and exotic new places of noise and sex and humour and spirit and warmth, and then as the music stretches higher that we’re all somehow getting there, to the pith and prune juice of it, all together and at the same time, and yet not staying too long there, because the itch to move on and to keep moving on is always there, and so we shift and shunt on through. . . there is something about that which only jazz can do.
That night in Quito it happened, the whole room was taken on a flight, and I thought of Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise sitting listening to George Shearing on the piano, and felt happy and relieved that my life had landed me in a similar place. I realised that the On the Road spirit is not about the awful deadening cool – the cool exemplified to me earlier in Moscow. It’s not about dark glasses and Marlboros drooping from lower lips, or who can look least affiliate and least engaged; it is the opposite. Being that sort of cool is really for the dullest pricks. It is about sweetness of spirit and boldness and appetite; it is about daring to look further and to discover more. Moriarty and Paradise, Kerouac and Cassidy, Hamlet himself – all explorers in the spirit, out looking in the world.
As John said as he wandered around Lima with eyes wide open; ‘You can’t take a wrong turn,’ he said, ‘You just can’t take a wrong turn.’
It’s not only what’s there, but also how you enjoy what’s there. The company were great at mapping and investigating, but they also engaged. Compliments for a plate of food, debate with a protestor, a haggle with a vendor, lazy chat with a barman, quizzing of local historians. Keith was always charging off on nature trips; Miranda recorded a native song in every country; the boys went out drabbing to clubs; Amanda sought out and bought a musical instrument particular to each country; all looked for nuggets of detail and anecdote and information that opened up the world to them a little more. They knew you have to be alive to the world for it to come to you. Just as Dean and Sal do through fifties America, and just as we imagine Hamlet doing before the roof falls in.
The level of surprise was still strong. In Lima I was standing at a crossroads, and someone suddenly appeared and did a handspring nearly over my head. His partner appeared, and they did acrobatics together, hurling each other this way and that. Music abruptly started, and the acrobatics morphed into break-dancing. An audience gathered, but no one seemed to have asked them to; they were just happy to do their thing. That commitment to unembarrassed joy, to expressing an alive public contentment felt a long way from home. There was something free here. It felt like a veil of fear and loathing and guilt had been lifted.
To take a moment of peace from this riot of sensual excess, the sanctuary was the same now as it had been for centuries. The heat, the noise, the bustle and the motion – all came to a halt just by passing through a heavy wooden door and sitting for a moment in a church. Whether it was through the high arched door of a basilica, or down a corridor into a cloister, or slipping under a low lintel into a discreet chapel, the temperature drop was a cooling necessity. The sun was blocked out, the heat disappeared, and stillness reigned. It was the church as a spiritual fridge, where we park ourselves on a shelf, shut down our antennae and try our best to keep ourselves fresh. Realignment in stillness, letting the quiet of centuries lower your shoulders a little. I’m not sure it opens up ‘more things in heaven’, far from sure about heaven in fact, but there are surely ‘more things’ than what is just in the markets and on the streets. A confirmed agnostic, I can’t see the point in not leaving oneself open to everything. Why miss a party?
In the magnificent Basilica San Francisco in Quito, an imposing white without, a palace of shining gold within, I sat still for a moment. A flush of guilt passed through me about the spoiling of happiness I was receiving. Kerouac’s ‘digging’ was all very well, the sampling and the relishing of the world, but what was the quid pro quo? The question popped up, and the answer sailed in with a modest grace, blown in by the still and the quiet of the room. All that matters is the sum of happiness, and that you increase it, however you are able. You can go to the sad part of a town and give a little happiness, or you can go to the happier place, sit and drink in what they offer, and then give some back. What matters is the sum of happiness, and that you grow it and don’t diminish it, now and beyond.
What we were doing was similar to On the Road but not the same. We had the freedom, the same rapture at the world, the same restless desire to savour or to ‘dig’ the details and the panorama. Yet for us there was an extra privilege – we were able to give something back. Not just digging but planting also. Something both fragile and sturdy, our beloved Hamlet, with his unique capacity to break hearts and open minds. Each journey, each leg, was an inhale of sensation and culture, and an exhale of Hamlet. There was hardly ever a better exhale than in Lima.
* * *
Happy hour isn’t just about cocktails. Out on the street, that hour between six and seven bristles with happiness all the world over, but nowhere as vibrantly as in South America. The long day done, the evening ahead, the work may have been hard, and the glass may be less than half full, but at that moment the promise of the evening ahead begins to fill the glass. At that moment, our lives are a blend of fact and imagination, the fact of the day past, and the imagining of the night ahead as we wonder how good the show will be, how tasty the dinner, how fierce the fight, how sweet the kiss.
The Peruvians were working up a frenzy of potential. It was not only our show opening that night, but also a festival. We were doing TV interviews on the balcony outside their theatre, and were comprehensively upstaged by what unfurled in the street behind us. A team of circus performers were doing impossible acts. There appeared to be trapezes and tightropes emanating from bicycles on which ludicrously lithe people hurled themselves around. Beyond their mid-air tumbling, large abstract shapes made from paper went up in spectacular flames. It was gravity defying and jaw-droppingly exciting. As a way of getting an audience ready for a production of Hamlet, it set the bar a little high. The theatre was a nineteenth-century proscenium palace, beautifully proportioned and all decked out in cream and gold. The tickets were free and the crush to get in severe. All of Lima seemed to be trying to cram in, and their excitement and their pleasure at being with each other was intoxicating. Ladi was out early in the pre-show and flirting with half the audience, and Keith gave the Mayor a flower, which was a good start. At the top of the show, when Tommy did his speech of greeting, he simply said hello, and the audience erupted into three minutes of greeting and applause, Amanda had a grin to split her face; the rest were slack-jawed in amazement. It was so warm-hearted as to be overwhelming – ‘as a stranger give it welcome’. With fireworks.
The show that followed was ev
erything you could want it to be. I had seen a couple of pale and disaffected shows in Bogotá, a very strong one in Quito, and this was a step-change. Strong, muscular, clear, carved out of space, definite, funny when it needed to be, private when it needed to be, epic when it needed to be. A thrilling story, a joyride of thought and language. The adrenalin rush that we hoped for. There was a sense at the interval that they didn’t want it to stop. But the excitement picked up in the second half, and the committed attention to each word was breathtaking. Each word seemed to matter to that room as it passed by, and to add to the continuing life of this unlimited poem. The roar at the end matched and exceeded the roar at the beginning, and we floated off to dinner full of bubbling joy. We talked of all we had seen: the crowds of people, the great bustle of the earth, and how it didn’t fill us with terror or gloom; it filled us with a great feeling of the sweetness of humanity. We straggled back to the hotel in twos and threes, walking through the dark of Lima, and all full of, well. . . fullness. Replete.
* * *
Hamlet, and indeed most Shakespeare, happily qualifies to share space within the magical-realist tradition. There is no shortage of levels. You’ve got a Ghost, who pops up on three occasions; you have streams of consciousness and songs of confusion and need expressed through blank verse; you have politics, both in the regime change which precedes the play and the revolution that continually threatens it; you have the ludic shifting of different realities with the play within the play; you have the classical backdrop with the speeches on the fall of Troy; there’s a bit of broad clowning humour with the Gravediggers, which actually manages on occasion to be funny; you have a love story, both domestic and epic; there’s family politics; there’s fabulism and stories folding into other stories; there’s even a generational saga element with the Fortinbrases and the Hamlets fighting it out through time. It’s hard to imagine a García Márquez or a Vargas Llosa or an Allende that manages to stuff in more, or that takes greater pleasure in the telling. We often get so obsessed with the darkness and the gloom and the existential pain of Hamlet, we lose sight of the pleasure of telling a story.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 27